Information Gravity and Tipping Points

The subject of del.icio.us came up, after it transpired one of my colleagues had met the VC who bought it off its original owner for half a million or so and the sold if for over ten times that to Yahoo. Nice. A lot of people seem to underestimate the relevance of tagging to this ‘Web 2.0’ revolution, they just don’t get what’s so compelling about it.

To me the impact of tagging is fascinating, people find information – either their own (photos) or other people’s (del.icio.us) and categorise this based on their perception of the content. A picture of a cat can be tagged anything from ‘my cat‘/’prudence‘ to ‘feline‘/’white‘/’brown‘/’animal‘ to ‘cuddly‘/’cute‘/’green eyes‘ and so on. There is no prescribed structure, just pure description based from a personal context. Obviously this has issues, as the tags in the last example clearly indicate – a search on ‘cat’ would not bring up any of those photos. Hmm. But we’re talking here about a single example, in the mass of information you are pretty likely to find what you seek, a lot of people will have tagged their photos ‘cat‘. Just by clicking on a few of these tagged links you can see how diverse a journey you go on, so the end impact of tags is fascinating and enjoyable. This is why flickr won out over dotPhoto in my mind (and I loved dotPhoto). So how did we get to this end result? A tipping point.

A tipping point is the time at which enough early adopters of a technology tell enough other people to join in (social networks) and suddenly everyone you know is on there and creating this amazing community of shared concepts. Where tagging is so fundamental to this is that it is just so easy. For me to upload a photo to flickr, and add a couple of quick words to my photos to describe them (eg, ‘black and white‘ or ‘cityscapes‘) takes a few seconds, no effort. Plus the added organisational ability I now have is often immediately useful, as I wander around my own photos looking at others I took recently to see how I’ve come along. This ease is where tagging creates a tipping point – or in this case what I see as ‘information gravity’, a few pieces of information do not attract us, but a mid heavy mass of related information (almost knowledge) for us to play around with is highly attractive and that brings more information in there and then more people and then usefulness.

Yes, tagging is not right in all situations. Our search on cat won’t find every photo out there with a cat in, detailed specific searches are often impacted, but since when have human interactions been that exact? Yahoo buying del.icio.us is just a sign that they have realised they’re old school, Internet 1.0 cataloging was the wrong way forward – intensive, flawed but useful for what it was. Now they’re trying to redress that balance as they follow Google’s slip stream.

Tagging is messy, human, fun and replete with it’s own implicit knowledge (why did that person tag their car as ‘home’). Tagging also offers whole new business models as people start to specialise in de-coding these new flows of information for profit. So embrace the tag and come play in the information highway…

Ps, For further background check out Clay Shirky‘s ‘Ontology is Over-rated‘ presentation. Great stuff.