The day I broke the web (2.0)

That's it - I've had enough.

After many years trying to pretend that user tagging as a navigation form was a good thing, I've cracked.

Here's my straw (that broke the camels back)

GoogleTalk conversation with my brother

"Hi, did you enjoy the snow?"
"Yes, built a lovely snow man and [blah blah blah]"
"I spent the day laughing at vans skidding down Dyke Road into the kerb"
"That does sound funny - did you get any pictures?..."

So far so web 2.0 good. But, "ah ha!" I thought, "I work in a big building full of digital types, someone will have uploaded some skiddy van pics to the internet that I can show my brother.

Here, things start to get a little gnarly.

First - I have to choose where to look for pics. Which means I have to guess what the latest uploading favourite of the digitalista's is today.

User generated content will cluster into cliques, just like people do. These cliques will have cultural barriers to entry: especially they require knowledge of the groups vocabulary, an awareness of the location of the group, and the skills to access it.



I'm not cool, so I tried Flickr.

Next step: search for a picture of a van sliding around in the snow in Brighton. Enter terms 'van', 'snow', 'Brighton' into search box; hit search = 3 results. None of them of van's outside my building. Not even sliding vans.

User's can't be relied on to create sufficient tags to support discovery by others. Tagging is a self-interested act, either for publication (marketing) or personal retrieval. I tag these posts 'BNM'(a clique), UI, usability etc. - but rarely scour the content for appropriate topics that describe the content.

I tried again with just 'Brighton' and 'snow', but then got over 7,000 results. It still seemed sensible to browse this list a bit, so I clicked through 9 or 10 pages, before resorting to using the advanced search and restricting the dates to this month.

Still over 2,000 results. By now I have invested about 15 minutes of my time (don't tell my boss) trying to complete a trivial and pointless task. Stubbornly I kept going till my brain melted (about another 10 minutes). I never found the picture. I didn't have the will to try again with different tags.

Choosing the wrong tags for retrieval hides content, but gives no clues about what else might work.

Tags are nice - they make us feel involved, they help us to communicate and to describe things for the benefit of others. They are great at supporting personal retrieval (I can tag all my own stuff with my own labels and always get it back).

But tags cannot do the job of structured and mediated collections and publishing. It was a gimmick, it works for some things, but too much gets lost or left behind. Including people.

The internet has the power to be a strong democratising tool. But if we create secret passwords and premium phrases, without which you either cannot discover or be discovered, we are locking the doors behind us.