Technorati’s new tag feature is the talk of the moment, and rightly so. First we had the Semantic Web, with its notion of using RDF metadata to organize the universe. But RDF’s complexity seemed to daunt even the uber-geeks, and it’s still not easy to find an RDF-based project in wide usage outside of research environments. As the Semantic Web’s formalisms failed to catch on, the human-readable simplicity of RSS and the informal folksonomy approach of Flickr and Del.icio.us took off like gangbusters. Now Technorati is trying to pull together various islands of simple, bottom-up metatagging into one big information pool.
It’s fun and interesting and worth following. (David Weinberger’s comments are valuable.) My big doubt arises from my memory of a previous metadata experiment. As the Web took off in the mid-90s, many of you will recall, Web publishers were encouraged to tag their own pages with keyword metadata to help search engines organize them. We dutifully did so, but the whole thing got polluted very quickly by metatag hijackers — the metadata equivalent of spammers — who tried to boost the visibility of their pages by appending high-profile metatags (inevitably, most of them were X-rated) to every page in sight. (I’m sorry to say that even Salon, under the prodding of a long-departed marketing executive, briefly participated in this self-destructive game, though that’s now thankfully ancient history.) Things got ugly so fast that the search engines quickly started ignoring metatags; finally Google came along with a better, harder-to-game system, which today legions are still hard at work trying to undermine.
What’s not clear to me is how the 2005 version of keyword metatags can avoid this fate. The moment financial value starts to be associated with the new folksonomies, won’t the spammers come out of the woodwork? If they can debase something as simple and seemingly non-commercial as blog comments, they can debase anything.
In pessimistic moments, I sometimes think that every online enterprise must sooner or later sink into the spamosphere. When I’m feeling sunnier, I simply conclude that any networked technology designed to be open enough to harness contributions from multitudes will inevitably also be open to spam-style manipulation, and that this struggle — what my colleague Andrew Leonard long ago labeled as “the techno-dialectic” — is simply as open-ended as life itself. The trick is to enjoy those parts of the cycle where legitimate users have gained a lap or two on the forces of spam evil. Now seems to be one of them.
POSTSCRIPT: After writing this, I see Technorati’s Dave Sifry offers some arguments for why tagging might be less prone to spam pollution than meta-keywords for Web pages. I hope he’s right…