Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Blog Four: Weinberger -- O'Reily

After going through and analyzing five chapters of Weinberger's ideas and trying to relate them to the "Web 2.0" and "Web Squared" articles, I found many connections. The connection I am going to focus primarily on for this post is the Web 2.0 and Web Squared's concept of collective intelligence and suddenly having all of this combined information made possible by technology. With all of this miscellaneous information, it needs some sort of organization or order to sort through it all. As a result, this is where Weinberger's idea of 'tagging' or 'third order' comes into play.

Weinberger's third order doesn't force data into categories but instead tags it. Wikipedia would be an example of data forced into one specific label. Tagging doesn't have those restrictions. For example at the top of page 92, Weinberger states that "Tagging lets a user of online resources - Web pages, photos - add a word or two to them so she can find them again later (Weinberger 92)." In other words, this concept of tagging can be used in music, movies, class websites, and just about anything on the World Wide Web. Delicious.com is a perfect example of how tagging can be amazingly useful and effective. It is a bookmarking site that allows the user to list web pages that he or she might want to go back to. To help you find the sites you've bookmarked, Delicious allows the attachment of whatever words you want to place with that link. For example, if I wanted to bookmark the Washington State University website, I would tag it with "Wazzu" or "WSU" or "Colleges". This concept is so useful because it allows the user to tag things his or her own way, making it unique and easy to remember.