BuzzMachine

The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.

Tagged

4 comments on Tagged

Tagged

: Clay Shirky leads off a new group blog on tagging, which I hope and assume will blossom into a salon on what comes after taxonomy. For example….

: We are tagging not just content but also people… and behaviors… and processes…

If I can be assured that I won’t be the victim of spam, impersonation, or privacy violations (big if’s), I want to be tagged so that as I go from site to site, I get what I want: Give me my local content, give me the ads I’m interested in, don’t tell me what I already know, find me the job I want…. It’s not a cookie but a tag I control.

: When I was at the Associated Press for a lunch recently — among a group of smart execs who will have a big impact on the future of news not just from the wire service but also across the industry and the internet — we speculated on the need for a content cookie: a tag that travels with content as it is syndicated.

So, for example, a wire story about, say, Apple could travel with meta data that allows the site that uses it to run contextual ads reliably targeted. And as people read and link to that story in a distributed world, it would be good to gather aggregated meta data, to find out how popular it is, who is reading it, and — most important — what other topics (and audience) are associated with it. This allows people to find the story more effectively in search engines and such and also educates the content provider to improve future stories.

: At Fred Wilson’s Exploding TV lunch a few months ago, we also talked about the need for video (and audio) that is distributed openly (not streamed) via BitTorrent and other means to carry tags and other meta data — content cookies — with them so that sponsor who will kill to support this content — they’ve wanted to turn the internet into TV from the start — can measure audience and demographics and serve and target ads (cue the people tags). At the same time, like magnets, the content should attract tags and meta data from the audience and their behaviors (e.g., people filed it under a topic or people like this watched it).

When this happens, the old networks will truly explode, for this allows you to share content and recommend and distribute it more efficiently than any old network can (witness my favorite Jon Stewart example) and it allows creators to be supported.

: AND: I should have added this and in response to a few frightened comments, I will:

Transparency and control are essential to this. I should control my tags and use them at my will; that’s part of the point of tagging, after all. So I can tell an online service where I am so I can get local news or weather or business listings; that would be convienient. I can tell Google I want results in English and German because I read both (sort of). I can tell employers about me and have them rush to my door because they need a me. That only works if I control the tagging and the use of it is transparent. The same is true of tagging content: It only works if you can see the tags and add them yourself and swarm around the best ones. Sorry. I should have added that.

4 responses to “Tagged”

  1. slim999 Avatar
    slim999

    Jeff,
    What a truly horrid idea.
    You are correct to be concerned about being the victim of spam, impersonation or privacy as while these may not be the goals of tagging – they will surely be its sordid byproduct.
    But you should also be concerned about the intellectual walls the use of such tags will build around you.
    When I go somewhere, I don’t want people to tailor make my content based on their idea of what they think I want to see. I want people to surprise me with something I may not have thought about before.
    God forbid I go to Google News and get a steady diet of information about Pampers, reviews of the latest Huffy bikes and targeted ads for Captain Crunch.

  2. Ric Locke Avatar
    Ric Locke

    Jeff, the problem with this is that it runs the risk of being immediately degraded into an electronic version of the “affinity card” like the ones at the grocery store, and even the cashiers and local managers are starting to rebel against those, with the result that the data the marketers were hoping to mine has started to come with increasing amounts of overburden. What you propose would just be an enabler of bigger, better, more voluminous spam generation. No, that’s not what it’s for — but beware of unintended consequences. Remember that comment spam is derived almost entirely from Google’s rank-by-link-number algorithm.
    My credit rating isn’t pretty, and I’m starting to get a burdensome number of telemarketing calls; I can’t imagine what it’s like for people with good numbers. If advertisers and marketers want support for this notion, they need to earn trust. A good way for them to do that would be to set up a vigilante organization that hunts spammers down, including the ones in their own ranks. Bastinado would be about right; reserve drawing and quartering for the top (or is it the bottom?) 10%.
    Regards,
    Ric

  3. Jeff Jarvis Avatar
    Jeff Jarvis

    Please see the added note on the post in response to your comments.

  4. Mike Peterson Avatar
    Mike Peterson

    Agree with Slim999 — I’m not hoping for more ways for people to become entranced with their own narrow, pre-existing interests, but ways to include them in the larger community of the world. In the days of three networks, we sat through the various acts on Ed Sullivan to see the Beatles, and, yes, there was a lot that wasn’t targeted to teens. But the result was that we knew a lot more about what our parents were interested in, just as they sat through the Dave Clark Five’s act and saw something about what we liked. Today, kids are up in their rooms watching narrowly targeted MTV or surfing for narrowly targeted music sites, and they know more about a 16-year-old on the other side of the world than about their 30-year-old neighbor. Despite the best efforts of Coors to market perpetual adolescense, these kids will probably grow up someday, at which point they will be responsible for paving streets and running school boards and making other community decisions. It would be nice, too, if they understood why their government is blowing people up on the other side of the globe. But it won’t happen if they are electronic navel-gazers with no sense of what else is going on around them. If I had my druthers, newspaper sites would find a quicker way than PDF to post their full content in page format, so that readers would accidentally come into contact with things they never would have thought to look for. Meanwhile, let’s not make ignorance-in-depth any easier to achieve.