Metadata for the Masses
Peter Merholz — “We’re beginning to see ethnoclassification in action on the social bookmarks site Del.icio.us, and the photo sharing site Flickr. Both services encourage users to apply their own freely listed tags to content — tags that others can then employ when looking for content. See a web page that looks interesting, but don’t have time to read it? Post it to Del.icio.us with a tag that will help you find it again.”
Who needs tags when you have Google Desktop? That is, rather than wasting time categorizing, formatting and sorting, just do nothing. That’s right, nothing. Let Google index your information then you can simply do ad hoc queries any time. Think about these questions. How do you know that your tags are any good, until you need them? How do you know that your own categories are useful, until you need them? That is the beauty of something like Google Desktop. They do the work for you upfront but you still get the benefit of an index for searching your own material. Your keyword searches become the categories that you would have created and used upfront. Wrap your mind around that.
October 20th, 2004 at 9:30 pm
And how exactly, does google figure out your pictures, music, or even links older than your web cache? Metadata is still a necessary component for some medium and always will be. Coincidentally, I wrote something similar this week: http://www.ok-cancel.com/archives/post/2004/10/search_is_not_all_there.html
Also see Tom’s reasons on why searching still has issues.