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Google is broken and all the King's horses and all the King's men...

Google search (and not just Google's) have more and more become less about quest (finding something one does not know) or inquiry but trend watching. The Web is more and more invisible and replaced by metrics of popularism and politics of a volksempfanger.

Searching for the phrase (pulled from a current news article)
        kebab and pie kiosk
        (no quotes or + etc. so the query runs as it was typed)


The social tagging game: tail wagging dog.

A critique of social tagging and Web 2.0 semiology


These days there is hardly a "Web 2.0" application that does not feature "tags" and does not display (somewhere) a variation of "tag cloud" visualizations.
"It is a saying among Divines, that Hell is full of good Intentions, and Meanings.
— R. Whitlock (1654)

Social tagging sets out to recast the whole "problem" of information discovery, search and retrieval into visibility driven not by relevance (whatever that may mean) but social network. Social tagging is not just a special form of meta-information but a strategic game. On the one hand it claims to allow a complete and fully conscious unstructured "cooperative" means to attach well intentioned extra-corporal meaning and their implicit social interconnections to information (including also non-textual multimedia objects) but its also in many ways a voting system. Those that tag by using common words set out to influence its visibility and potential influence. This is not a product of some systematic disruptive behavior— and I'll exclude for now a consideration of spamming or other exploits (which are not necessarily part of the system)— or aboration but precisely the function of tags: associating the commonality of the use of tags with a relevance of those objects so tagged. The rest are disassociated and effectively excluded. This focuses the attention of an anonymous and dispersed public to see less of the whole and be driven to a few more concentrated contributions chosen by "public opinion". What remains and discovered via the sphere of tags is de-contextualized and re-purposed.

Latest Stories

http://leo.bsn.com:11400/?q=pubdate%3e%3d2010-09-08T07:36:02%20pubdate%3c%3 ... 

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