The golden ideas
I love ideas that make you think – those classic light bulb moments. Not ideas which slip out the backdoor of your head before you’ve even finished reading. But the the ones that ring a little bell of clarity, that seem so obvious you can’t believe you didn’t say it yourself.
The Internet is a gold mine of these ideas. Information is supposed to be instant, at your fingertips. You don’t need to physically gather a group of like-minded friends together, invest hours in a book or a movie, to feel inspired. But that accessibility is also the problem. Unlike in book publishing and the movie business, the barrier of entry is so minimal, that it’s easy for people (like me) to put up a post and add to the growing debris mountain. I joined a secret group recently and was so overwhelmed by the amount of activity on the site that I didn’t know where to begin contributing, for fear of repeating thoughts voiced 30 pages (or years) ago.
Power to the people
So how do you wade through all of this? When you’re a child, it’s easy. You absorb everything and rapidly assemble sequences in your mind. But when you’re an adult and those thoughts are set, you tend to simply re-arrange rather than build new sequences. To change your thinking when you find a golden idea requires conscious effort.
The huge, unwieldy ball of mostly horrifically bad ideas used to be funnelled (and maybe censored a little or a lot) by gatekeepers. With the power of traditional leaders diminishing, who or what will take over? You will, and since I’ll be reading it you’d better not be letting garbage through. With the internet, we all become not only the content providers, but also the funnel. Finding valuable content is really now our responsibility.
Tagging
Yet it’s not easy. Digg, delicious, networking groups – these tools all help. But unless you stumble across an amazing idea or have time to spend hours searching for one, it’s more likely you’ll find it through a recommendation. However for recommendations to be effective, they need to come from someone who values similar things and can offer a different perspective.
Pushing the funnel analogy too far – the sizes and numbers of funnels is crucial. If there was one big funnel that let everything through to cater for each individual, the value of the funnel is defeated. Similarly, if every individual had their own funnel, the value of a group of people is lost. So both specialisation and diversity are required, which is no easy task – this is where the simple beauty of tags really lies. Multiple tags on a blog post funnels it to diverse destinations, but the choice of words different people use allows for maximum (limited only by language) specialisation.
What your tags say about you
When you forward a post to someone, you’re saying to them, ‘This is what I think about you – what I think you like’. But you are also saying something about yourself, especially if you qualify your recommendation. ‘This is good, but it rambles a bit’ refines what you value even further.
It’s the same with tagging, voting, inviting and other tools of a community. They are all subtle ways of declaring ‘I’m a fan of…’, of showing others a part of you. In the Web 2.0 world, you are what you tag.
References
