Peter: My authority article stirred up a fascinating discussion on Web4Lib centered around this question. Historically, librarians have been comfortable with the notion that the most frequently cited academic papers (and their authors) are also the most popular, findable, and authoritative. But many are horrified by the migration of this concept to the public web. In truth, the comparison is not totally fair. Scholars invest more thought and structure into their citations than we invest in our links. But the revolution in authority is real. In a world where we can select our sources and choose our news, we must increasingly make our own decisions about what to believe and who to trust. And thanks to the well-documented anchoring bias, we’re highly influenced by the first information we find. In this sense, Google’s algorithms are as much about authority as relevance. And this is why the subtitle of Ambient Findability is “What We Find Changes Who We Become.”
Gene: I know many people who don’t get tagging. Do you think tagging is a novelty? Or can you see some persistent value in it that will keep tags around?
Peter: I hate tagging. It’s too much work. It’s so much easier to drag and drop an email message into a folder than it is to construct keywords that define its aboutness. And with respect to refindability, using Google Desktop’s full text search is infinitely better than relying on the semantic poverty of tags. On the other hand, as one element of Google’s multi-algorithmic search solution, tags in the form of links are a wonderful source of collective intelligence. Also, as ubiquitous computing yields an Internet of (non-textual) objects, user-defined tags will be important alongside the manufacturer-supplied metadata.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/20/2005 09:34:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
