Yahoo My Web
Monday, 3 October 2005 07:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eHmmm... I just received an invitation from a good friend to participate in sharing links via Yahoo's myWeb. I couldn't log in to it, which was odd. I did some research on it and found that Yahoo are touting it as a social search system leveraging social networks to find relevant pages. (They'll have to fix it first.)
It actually sounds like people simply sharing bookmarks. I'm not knocking that; sharing bookmarks is incredibly valuable and a lot of blogging does exactly that. People sharing links via blogs have been very useful to me, but to call this a social search or to ever be tempted to limit a search to pages suggested by others strikes me as dangerous. Trying to turn a system of shared bookmarks into a popular search engine risks producing an ourouborous reminiscent of current big media.
One of the best things about the web is that which "experts" so decried when it first exploded into public consciousness. They worried that when everybody could self-publish nobody would be able to find the "real" information. Of course they were actually worried that "experts" would no longer have a privileged place in society. But what happened was a great surprise to almost everybody. We all suddenly had access to vastly more useful info than ever before and found that almost everyone is an expert on something. The few pre-web experts remained important in their fields, but we found that there were millions more experts than anybody previously thought.
Yahoo's myWeb sounds like a way of whittling the web down to the "manageable" size of the pool of pre-web experts. But of course this clearly can't be done. There are truly many millions of experts in everything out there on everything from overlockers to trypanosomes to Abba lyrics to MNG construction to cast iron toy cars of the '50s to reflectivity of smog aerosols to fungi found in Sunshine Coast, QLD forests.
It actually sounds like people simply sharing bookmarks. I'm not knocking that; sharing bookmarks is incredibly valuable and a lot of blogging does exactly that. People sharing links via blogs have been very useful to me, but to call this a social search or to ever be tempted to limit a search to pages suggested by others strikes me as dangerous. Trying to turn a system of shared bookmarks into a popular search engine risks producing an ourouborous reminiscent of current big media.
One of the best things about the web is that which "experts" so decried when it first exploded into public consciousness. They worried that when everybody could self-publish nobody would be able to find the "real" information. Of course they were actually worried that "experts" would no longer have a privileged place in society. But what happened was a great surprise to almost everybody. We all suddenly had access to vastly more useful info than ever before and found that almost everyone is an expert on something. The few pre-web experts remained important in their fields, but we found that there were millions more experts than anybody previously thought.
Yahoo's myWeb sounds like a way of whittling the web down to the "manageable" size of the pool of pre-web experts. But of course this clearly can't be done. There are truly many millions of experts in everything out there on everything from overlockers to trypanosomes to Abba lyrics to MNG construction to cast iron toy cars of the '50s to reflectivity of smog aerosols to fungi found in Sunshine Coast, QLD forests.
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It is the Semantic Web part of things that interests me
Date: 2005-10-03 02:03 am (UTC)This is interesting to me because they are approaching the whole idea of building web ontologies for the much-anticipated Semantic Web through user actions and social forces, rather than building them ahead of time and then shoe-horning things into the categories later.
The way they are building tag-sets for ontologies is interesting to me too, for we are really looking at social pressures as a way to keep the number of tags to a reasonable size and to keep duplications down to a dull roar. It may or may not work. I notice I have a category/tag called "cnn_news" applied to only one entry, and I notice I only "share" that category with 3 others but I share the use of a "video_news" tagging of that entry with 30,000 others. Good chance I'll reinforce the social strength of the "video_news" tag by either replacing my maybe-too-specific tag "cnn_news" with "news" or maybe just by adding the "news" tag to the already "cnn_news"-tagged entry.
jeffs