Jeff Jarvis interviews David Weinberger
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Jeff Jarvis: This is Jeff Jarvis for Beat TV on here with Dr. David Weinberger, a friend and one of the coauthors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, conductor on the train, and author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined. Thank you very much. And now, the author of Everything is Miscellaneous, a new book on tagging and folksonomy in this whole word.
So what’s the book about?
David Weinberger: It’s on tagging and folksonomy in the whole world. Comes out in May, so I just wanna do the marketing thing first.
It’s about what happens when you lose the constraints of the physical on how you organize ideas, information and knowledge, and what happens is it turns out it’s better to make – instead of having experts decide what the organization should be ahead of time and filter everything and put it nicely arranged, which is great in the real world – it really works and you have to do it – virtually, it turns out to be much better to make this giant honking pile of stuff, a miscellaneous pile, and tag it and let users tag it and you tag it and anybody can tag it so that users can find whatever they want, organize it the way that they want on the way out.
And that breaks the hold on authority that also works with idea based institutions like media and government and education and business have had.
Jeff Jarvis: It’s anarchy! What are you gonna do about that?
David Weinberger: Is it anarchy? You say it as if anarchy were a bad thing. First of all, the individual level for tagging – tagging allows an individual user to say what the book means to her or the photo or the music or whatever or any element of any of those things.
So it’s a reappropriation of meaning, actually, by the individual, and that doesn’t feel like anarchy at all any more than your desktop. You put the stuff together, and it looks like anarchy until you start doing the clustering and seeing the relationships and seeing that – at eBay, for example, where you learn that if you wanna sell your laptop, you better call it a notebook.
Not a laptop because most people call it a notebook, and so there’s some momentum behind that term, and that’s what folksonomies are; they express the momentum behind particular terms and tags, and so it is the organizing principle of, pardon me, the long tail, and it’s our organized principles, our tail and our organization.
What you’ve also taught me is that there are other benefits that come out of this. It’s one matter to just organize things and find them, but you learn more about content and people.
Jeff Jarvis: What are some examples of that?
David Weinberger: Well, you know a lot about a person by seeing how she’s tagged her world. You see what a particular object means to her. You see in the pattern, what sorts of topics matter to her, and then you can connect with somebody based upon how they’re thinking about their world, and their mechanisms are doing that or you can just browse through and say, “Oh, there’s an interesting tag found.”
It enables social groups to operate across the same vast array of information, also known as the web, but also sub-domains, and operate in ways that pulled them together sort of semantically through the way that they understand it, the way they take it.
Jeff Jarvis: We’ve always done that one way or another. Do we think about things in the same way? We can do it more widely across the web.
David Weinberger: Let me change the topic here for a moment. You’ve been talking about marketers and this new world since Cluetrain, really, and you’ve advised companies like _____ and so on through the years. Here were are surrounded by marketers at another conference, trying to figure out this world.
Jeff Jarvis: Question: Is it possible for marketers to be truly transparent?
David Weinberger: Well, that is the question, isn’t it? It’s, I think, even more pointed about PR because to the extent to which you make your motivations apparent, the less likely you are to be believed. I’m doing this for the money. I’m saying these things for the money; that sort of takes away from the credibility, as it should, so the challenge is – one of the challenges is how can somebody who is being paid to talk ever enter a conversation without corrupting it, just apparently?
Jeff Jarvis: It’s not clear that you can.
David Weinberger: Well, either corrupting the conversation or the other argument would be corrupting themselves, but we bloggers – you’re not, but a lot of us bloggers are trying to make some money off this in advertising. Is that necessarily corrupting too?
Jeff Jarvis: No, it helps that the money is so small.
David Weinberger: Also, it’s easy to be transparent about it, which helps a lot, and the fact is, nobody’s pure. I disclose, as you do, and I have any type of relationship with a company, but I generally don’t bother disclosing if I’m talking about Microsoft, with whom I have no – don’t do any work for them.
But I don’t bother saying that 20 years ago, I was the liaison for a company I worked with for Microsoft, and we had a tempestuous relationship, and that does color my eye, and I have friends there and that. There’s no such thing as complete transparency, but there still is an absolute need to be as transparent as possible.
So what I’m saying is; yeah, it adds onto your blog; you make a good-faith effort to try to root out in yourself when you think it may be influencing; you say so. I don’t see anything wrong with that. It’s harder when you’re making your living trying to influence people, not with the ads on the side of your blog, but in what you’re saying.
Jeff Jarvis: The ad relationship is very clear.
David Weinberger: That’s the ad.
Jeff Jarvis: And you can judge the production, whereas a consulting relationship says, “I’m trying to figure out your business with you, and I may have to protect your rear-end when you mess up.”
David Weinberger: Yes, and in terms of marketers entering the conversation, a marketer who is getting paid by a company, generally, a PR person or a marketer, in order to influence the conversation. Entering a conversation in order to influence it is almost always a corrupting influence on a conversation, although there are exceptions, especially when you don’t say that’s what you’re doing.
That’s just really bad. That’s –
Jeff Jarvis: All right, _____ reds here together, finally, about tagging information and marketing and all that stuff. We’re on a panel this afternoon that I thought was about marketing, but it was really about measurement, so fine; we’ll go with the flow.
There are new opportunities and new things to measure in this world. Folksonomy gives you a new opportunity to qualitative and find out what things are about. What are the new frontiers of measurement, quantitatively and qualitatively, online for marketers, for scholars, for search engines? What are the things that people are doing that you can now measure in new ways? Any thoughts? None at all.
David Weinberger: You can see the shape, sort of semantic shape of the market by looking at folksonomy. Folksonomies are – it’s not clearly exactly how well they map to people’s actual sense of meaning; for example, you may be using a tag, and thus, influencing the folksonomy because it’s meaningful to you in a way that it’s not meaningful – somebody else is taking it somehow differently.
I may be using a tag because it’s not what I think is the most, but it is the one that I think other people will help other people find, so folksonomies are not a perfect map, but then what is? In terms of the metrics and click-throughs and blank-throughs and curse throughs and the rest of it, if it’s important, I don’t know anything about it.
Jeff Jarvis: Two folksonomies maybe to help you teach a little bit or learn a little bit about influencers or the speed of trends or anything else? Is there any kind of flab and flow to them that’s interesting?
David Weinberger: Sure. You can see in a tag cloud, plot a tag cloud, that is a visual representation of the tags that are being used, and you can see one’s coming and going, and it’s a nice little visual display. And the obvious use, which is already being done, is for companies, and PR companies in particular, to watch tags to see if their brand is popping up, especially in conjunction with profits.
So sure, I don’t know that this really changes very much. Nice tool, but the web’s there for us to use and to make sense of. It’s only secondarily, tertiarily, quadkinarily there for marketers to measure and make money out of them.
Jeff Jarvis: So Everything is Miscellaneous is coming out in?
David Weinberger: In May.
Jeff Jarvis: And it will soon be online?
David Weinberger: Only – no, not really. Little bits, you know; it’s marketing. Sorry, it’s paper, okay? Sorry.
Jeff Jarvis: David Weinberger. Thank you.
David Weinberger: Thank you.
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AlwaysOn, AO Media, Jeff Jarvis, David Weinberger
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