Since I seem to have missed points on earlier blogs about answering the prompt and looking through what we should focus on in the reading. I am going to leave out fluff.
Political:
“Classification is a power struggle—it is political—because the first two orders of the order require that there be a winner.” Organizing in the first two orders bounds us into ranking where certain “things” should be put. It’s a political struggle between if one item should be put on one leaf or the other.
Tagging:
Classification in the digital world consists of tagging. Letting people create their own tags allows them to find online resources faster. “…in a traditional tree, an object can be only one branch, at Delicious, tagging a Web address with multiple tags in effect puts it on many branches.” This relates to Web 2.0 for the fact that the users of Delicious are creating the content. Web 2.0 is about the user and how he/she interacts with the web. Tagging is a perfect example of interactivity within the web.
Four new strategic principles
1) Filter on the way out, not on the way in. Within this section they even mentioned two Web 2.0 terms; blogoshpere and the Long Tail. In referring to blogoshphere the author is saying that the digital world has changed how publishing works. For example, you no longer need to have some kind of scholarly publishing company, like the Harvard business Review, accept your piece of work. We as a user have the capability of publishing online for anyone to see. This ties in to the long tail for the fact that people are now able to have personal niche markets on the internet. “…filtering on the way in decreases the value of that abundance by ruling out items that might be of great value to few people.”
2) Put each leaf on as many branches as possible. This one is pretty self explanatory. “Hanging a leaf on multiple branches makes it more findable by customers.” It is to our advantage that we tag correctly and have items and things labeled on multiple branches.
3) Everything is metadata and everything can be a label. The author has a great example about searching online for information about a book. The basic idea here is that everything is connected and therefore everything is metadata. You can search for a book and find the title or have a line in a book, search that, and come with the title. Metadata is what you already know and data is why you’re trying to find out. The more labels you have for items, the easier it is to find.
4) Give up control. Enabling the users of the web to label and tag gives the user the ultimate control over a website. “Put simply, the owners of information no longer own the organization of that information.”
All in all, this book, so far, is focused on letting us know that the digital order of categorization and organization is user focused. One of the main focuses of Web 2.0 is that the user is in control. Customization is a key aspect in the world we live in today. So, as you can see Weinberger and Web 2.0 go hand in hand.
Random kind of relating thing haha. Well procrastinating this assignment with StumbleUpon I ran into this website: http://static.echonest.com/musicmaze/MusicMaze.html When I saw it i knew I was going to have to post it on my blog. Check it out for your self and play around. It only give you a little preview of the song. I just think it is interesting how they choose bands of the branches. Good or Bad choices?
This is a really thorough and interesting break down of the material. You summed up the connections between the readings very well... "digital order of categorization and organization is user focused" I really enjoyed the link you provided as well!
ReplyDeleteYou do a great job breaking down the key points of Weinberger here. A few direct shout outs to the O'Reilly article would've helped a bit, but overall it's a really strong post. Also, music maze is totally fascinating.
ReplyDeleteYou did a good job of summarizing the points of this reading. I am making comments several months on and you work brings the reading right back into my head. I feel like new ways to tag meta data are pretty cool. I wonder if it well ever get to the point where we don't have to tag things but instead they will be tagged automatically based on or actions when we see them.
ReplyDeleteAs with what others have said, good read. Specific details help keep the material relevant. Tagging all of the user input and content is critical to organizing the information. With what Jason has said about the automatic tagging, some technologies already exist that do this. But, it is not reliable. Facebook has an automatic tagging feature to scan peoples faces in pictures and tag them.
ReplyDelete