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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Tagging, the Web's newest game, lets you see what other people are reading and thinking. Welcome to the key-worded universe.
Feb 8, 2005 | Erik Benson, 28, is a man with plans -- 28 plans.
His goals include writing a good novel, seeing "The Daily Show" live and starting a company that survives longer than two years.
He's posted these aspirations for the whole Web to see at "43 Things," a site he and some friends launched at the beginning of 2005. The purpose of the site: Anyone can post their goals, resolutions and grand designs, and meet others who share the same ambitions. There are currently 119 other people on 43things.com decreeing their pledge to do a start-up that makes it past that two-year threshold. Nine others are hankering to see Jon Stewart give his mocking spin on the news in person and eight more burn to write a good novel. (Update: After publication of this story, Salon learned that 43 Things is primarily funded by Amazon.com.)
But what's intriguing about 43 things isn't the voyeuristic itch it scratches, as we get to see so many people baring their heart's desire. What makes the site work is how it connects all these people to each other. By a simple software tweak known as tagging, this site and many others, like the photo site Flickr and the bookmark-sharing system del.icio.us, have found a new way to organize information and connect people. The surprise is that the organizing itself is unorganized -- and yet it works.
On 43 Things you state a goal, such as "write a novel." That immediately links you to all the other people who have the exact same goal. But you also attach tags to your goal -- essentially key words that you choose -- such as "writing," "novel" and "fiction." Tags are not selected from any pre-codified hierarchy set by the site designers. They simply arise from the grass roots -- you and others like you. Now you're suddenly connected to everyone with similar goals, such as "write a good novel" and "write a book and have it published" and "finish my novel."
It's a very simple concept, and 43 Things is a very simple site, but tagging as it is used here and at some of the Web's most interesting and lively new sites is launching a revolution of self-organization on the Internet. You could call it the latest twist in the ongoing evolution of social networking software. Except there's a difference: On social networking sites like Orkut or Friendster, people join, and then declare their alliances to each other explicitly. On sites that employ tagging, the networks emerge, implicitly, out of the shared interests of users. Order isn't proclaimed, it just happens.
What 43 Things does for personal goals, the bookmark-sharing site del.icio.us does for everything its users are interested in on the Net. Here, what people are looking at and saving from the Web becomes the basis for learning new things, and making connections with each other. "It's like Friendster for knowledge as far as I'm concerned," says Howard Rheingold. "I look to see who the other people are on del.icio.us who tag the same things that I think are important. Then, I can look and see what else they've tagged ... And isn't that part of the collective intelligence of the Web? You meet people who find things that you find interesting and useful -- and that multiplies your ability to find things that are interesting and useful, and other people feed off of you."
Tagging is by no means perfect -- even its biggest proponents are quick to point out that there are glitches. Words are slippery things: "One person's Israel is another person's Palestine. One person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter," says Dave Sifry, the founder of Technorati, a site that recently enabled real-time searching of the tagged Internet.
If you give users control over how things will be categorized, you never know what will come out the other end. After all, what could be more culturally and socially determined than how we choose to label the things we're thinking about?
