Slashdot posts about spam blogs and wonders how to possibly, “filter the signal from the torrent of noise.” The torrent of noise is also present in tag clouds, which Zeldman compared to Mullets and wrote, “Tag clouds harness all that mindless accidental randomness.” See that accidental randomness in action on Technorati’s Blog Tag result. Technorati is, “currently tracking 12 million sites and 1.2 billion links,” and in those millions of sites and billions of links we find proof of Sturgeon’s Law: ninety percent of everything is crap.
Back to the future of tags
Tagging is like going back to the future. When I worked on SGML projects in the pre-dawn of the web, we tagged everything. Meta this, meta that and of course, years later search engines starting ignoring all that tagging (At the time, I sat through a mind-boggling presentation on Property Sets and Groves and spoke with tag vendors). While tagging folksonomies feel good, they also are freely based on whatever anyone wants to tag. Zeldman also noted that, “Tag clouds are not dumb,” but the rush to use them is.
So should business blogs tag their posts? That’s another topic for discussion at the next Blog Business Summit.
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