At yesterday’s meeting we talked about image recognition, organization, browsing, and searching. New techniques often require the “seeding” of metadata by humans before recognition can take off on its own. This ties in with thoughts on tagging (mostly stimulated by our Tag-Guru Phillip): what happens when you get a lot of people tagging, how can this new metainformation can be used, what is “good” and “bad” tagging, and what does “bad” tagging do to the system? For example, what happens when I tag a photo of my laptop with “waffles”?
In some arenas tagging like this might be okay because I can personally filter content returned from a tag-based search. But what happens in the work world? Or what about reliance on other applications (I’m trying to avoid saying “agents”) for searching and even possibly decision making? Who will be the tag-police?
That term makes it sound nasty and controlling. Though I do think that we will see the emergence of tag “moderators” once the idea of tagging crosses over to non-personal and social domains. OK but really, these “moderators” have been around for a while. Think librarians, knowledge managers, etc. People who study and work at the classification, sorting, indexing, searching, retrieval of information. Only now they have to deal with an added variable: you and me and our ability to help with that classification.
Think of the library scenario. Imagine that you are able to personally tag books, articles, journals, magazines, etc. found in the library. Monitoring these tags would be a fulltime job. That brings me to what I was thinking when I started writing this…a new job market of people who monitor and balance the metadata or metainformation of the world’s content. Can you imagine that too? Does it already widely exist and I clued out on something?