Wonder who actually invented tagging? Many are quick to say social tagging started with del.icio.us and social voting started with digg. Back in 1991, Xerox PARC was working on such ideas in a system called Tapestry which was described in a 1992 Communications of the ACM article. You can read the article here. Here's what I've taken from that article:
“The Tapestry system was designed and built to support collaborative filtering. Collaborative filtering simply means that people collaborate to help one another perform filtering by recording their reactions to documents they read. Such reactions may be that a document was particularly interesting (or particularly uninteresting). These reactions, more generally called annotations, can be accessed by others’ filters.” (Emphasis theirs.)
If you read this carefully, this paper was the first to use the term ‘collaborative filtering". It assumed that “some annotations are themselves complex objects, and those annotations are more simply stored as separate records with pointers back to the document they annotate.” This design would sound familiar to anyone who had implemented a “modern” social tagging and voting system. Xerox Parck had came uo with so many great innovations and unfortunately they were less successful in bringing them to the market. It’s always interesting to read an old paper nd get some historical perspective in the age of 2.0.
Here's a funny piece of how "tagging" moves to the real world. In cities like Berlin and Seoul guerrilla "taggers" have been tagging outdoor ads with personal evaluations delivering messages such as "this ad makes me sick", "I like this ad", "I find this campaign boring" etc. It's a guerrilla action with the objective of raising the level of consumers' awareness about the quality of advertising. I am not sure the ad agencies like this idea.
Here's big idea. Let us develop a TV commercial tagging system via a remote control that allows us to assign "relevance" or "entertainment value" to TV ads. Those who are tagged most as more entertainment will be played more or paying less for their airtime than those tagged with "boring". This way we can bring 2.0 old ideas to television advertising. What do you thing?
