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March 29, 2024

Heard While Outselling: Tag, You’re It

Important Details:  

What We’re Seeing: New York media met Silicon Valley edge thinking at last week’s SIIA West Coast Content Forum, held in San Francisco. One technology panel gave publishers much to think about. As publishers struggle with their own content management systems, these young technologists said that the power in people’s fingertips to put their own categories (tags) on content of all kinds and share those tags is the emerging story of our time. Among the highlights:

Digg founder Kevin Rose on his site and how people use it: “You find a story you dig … A friend has dug it … There are five people who are digging this story.” Digg is a site that allows its users (9 million pages visited a day) to tag stories with their own categories, highlighting those stories for the wider “community” and themselves. While mainly oriented to tech content, Digg soon will branch out to news in general. Among the coming innovations are spatial charts that show what stories friends are tagging, and the ability to make new friends: “If you find someone who is into oolong tea, we can introduce you to that person.”

Google’s Bret Taylor, product manager for developer programs, on mash-ups and the power of niche audiences, if not markets: “People are figuring out how to fill a very big need for a very small group of people.” On how many news channels we’ll have (hint, more than a dozen): “There are billions of pieces of articles and millions of channels.”

WetPaint’s CEO Ben Elowitz, showing off his WikiFido site, where dog lovers build an info database and argue about whose dog is the cutest: “To get our Web 2.0 certification, we had to put a tag cloud in place,” poking fun at the tagging crowd whose work with Digg, Gmail, and del.icio.us, among numerous others, suggests that the old top-down-driven categorization systems (taxonomies) are dead and are being replaced by the wisdom of crowds. On wiki power vs. blog power: “A blog starts with one voice. We want a community.”

Joshua Schachter, founder of del.icio.us  (now owned by Yahoo!) on what tagging really does: “Tagging is about the memory of what you want to know later – it’s not perfecting the taxonomy. It’s not about taxonomy.”

In Outsell’s Opinion: Publishers need to learn and parse this new vocabulary in understanding the emerging content world. Content is no longer a one-way conversation, or a two-way conversation, but one that is about the buzz created ad hoc, 24/7, by communities of all kinds. 

Implications: