As little as 3 years ago, I’d never heard anyone say “Google it!”. Now, it’s part of mainstream society. The electronic data revolution has unfolded in strange and beautiful ways. Information Architects were born to organize and categorize data on the html page, but over all, electronic data retrieval across the web is a problem. The free terrain of web space has become a melting pot of society, each bringing their own, unique character to the mix. We are currently looking at the accumulation of about 10 years worth of collective crap. Why? Because what we really want to know we can’t find.
NOW HEAR THIS: As we, the public, enter more and more crap into cyberspace, it has now become our social duty and moral obligation to diligently tag our information. Now comes another new word: folksonomy, introduced by Thomas Vander Wal. Folksonomy is when there is enough social tagging of content that categories emerge. Technorati is a website that is currently indexing these categories. It is reporting what people are electronically saying right now. Why? Because, if we can’t find it, does it really exist?
