… the vision Yang and Yahoo co-founder David Filo had in their Stanford University dorm rooms: Categorize the Web and recommend the best sites for its users, using human editors. That vision had to be abandoned when the Web got too large. But this time the users and the editors will be one and the same, there will be enough to tackle the entire Internet — and Yahoo won’t have to pay them.
I see a couple of problems with this. First, as I mentioned, it’s a whole lot more efficient to use a search engine to find what you want than to rely on someone else’s possibly arcane or irrelevant categories. Second, Yahoo hired very smart people to do their categorization, like philosophy majors. Do you think that the vast majority of Internet users know that the Nietzschean uber-man is not the same as superman? No, they don’t know that. And they’re not going to categorize the Internet in a useful way either. They will provide plenty of tag spam for sure. But will they do anything that makes me more efficient and productive? I doubt it. Tech weenies and marketers may find that tag clouds make them feel all tingly but I bet regular Internet users will yawn. Third, once I or someone else have tagged any significant amount of information we will need a search engine to find what we want. So we are back to the search engine.
But, you say, I am only going to look at the tags that my community uses. Surely that will be useful. I only hang out with smart people. The problem is, you are reading those smart people’s feeds and using the same blog aggregators/filters they use, and doing everything else they do… the tagging only reproduces the information and meta-information that already exists.
Now images, that’s a whole different ball of tags. Pictures need translation and description. There’s no textual information in them. There’s no one talking about them, except via services like Flickr. I haven’t tried Flickr in any substantive way but I can see its usefulness.
Given all this and despite Yahoo’s purchase of Flickr, I’m betting that in 2006 the Google borg will continue to dominate the web landscape and Yahoo will fall off into obscurity.
