METADATA AS A SOURCE OF DIGITAL ANTHROPOLOGY

One of the most interesting things I am focused on right now is how to use the metadata that is increasingly abundant on web 2.0 sites. My main focus is tags on places like Flickr, and Technorati.

This form of tagging has the rather clumsy name of a folksonomy.

A Folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content; this practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging. Source: Wikipedia

These folksonomies give us a picture of the collective view, a summary of the zeitgeist, an understanding of the popular interpretation of meaning. There is personal meaning, and shared meaning. By looking at a tag such as happiness on flickr you can explore the collective meaning of the word and associated tags clustered around it.

Equally, by exploring the tag happiness on Technorati, you get an equally interesting array of associated tags, a list of the bloggers most frequently using that tag, and an understanding of the how the word is interpreted or used.

This bottom-up type of tagging is likely to be real way that the semantic web starts. Sir Tim Berners-Lee W3C is trying valiantly to get a top-down system of tagging to happen but that is currently unlikely to happen.

It's going to be a tricky affair making all of this work. Both of the images below came up from a image search on Google using the keyword "freedom"



Semantics and semiotics are complicated sciences and I am far from claiming any kind of breakthrough, but I am clear that understanding how to interpret the collective intelligence will be important. These tags are the same tags that are keywords in search engines results that pull from website metadata, blog post labels, and file names, and other sources. Coming up with clever ways of interpreting this data is going to be pretty important going forward.

THE APPS ECONOMY AND THE EVOLUTION OF MOBILE SOFTWARE

I like this piece by Kyle Bean, a young British artist. More here about him. It conveys the rapid innovation the mobile phone has undergone, and underlines the fact that miniaturization is not the next challenge any more. Nor is it about packing the phone with more hardware features, such as bigger and better cameras, or music, or screens. It's all about the software and the application, as proved by Apple and its App Store, and Google and Android.

I am a very reluctant convert to iPhone Apps, as you might read in this piece in Marketing Magazine. With such a tiny share of the market, for me creating iPhone Apps for mass market brands was akin to creating websites that only worked for Apple's Safari web browser. This is all set to change with the announcement at the WDC of a $99 iPhone.

Creating Apps is already a big business, but with an even bigger mainstream market beckoning there is going to be a wave of new apps launched into an already saturated market. Getting noticed on the App Store is tough. But like on Facebook with its Apps, the novelty wears off very quickly, and once shiny new apps are placed in the ignore-me-cemetery very quickly. My interest is in apps with utility that serve a life purpose, rather than those that are gimmicks.

The apps economy is going to be a very interesting market to study going forward, and will start to migrate from mostly a gimmick based market, to one that looks like a traditional software market. Expect to see Apps with marketing budgets that launch new versions with huge advertising campaigns and razzmatazz each year, a la Windows. All of this, however, is a huge pain for agencies, who are expected to specialise in multiple platforms, multiple categories, and have multiple skillsets, all under one roof at all times.