Gene Smith posted a great summary of tagging news for the year. [LINK]
Some highlights show that Yahoo is building up quite the tagging arsenal:
Ontology is Overrated (March). Clay Shirky’s provocative talk at Etech predicted that the rise of tagging meant the death of hierarchy. Or something like that. A bit too dogmatic for me, but it was received like a papal bull and produced some interesting critiques and counter-critiques. (To give credit where it’s due, this blog wouldn’t exist but for Clay’s presentation.)
Yahoo buys Flickr (March). The first big acquisition of what some people call the “Web 2.0 era” (I call it “Ned”).
Yahoo launches My Web 2.0 (June). Yahoo integrated search, social networks and tags in its My Web 2.0 product. Some people noted the product’s lacklustre growth, which perhaps set the stage for another socsoft/web 2.0 acquisition by Yahoo at the end year.
Yahoo buys del.icio.us (December). The rumoured price was around $30 million, which has Yahoo spending about $100 for each of the 300,000 or so del.icio.us users. The interesting question is how does tagging behaviour figure into the price? I think (and this is purely speculation) Yahoo paid for millions of tagged URLs plus a community of active taggers, both of which promise to boost the relevance of search results.
Print | posted on Wednesday, December 28, 2005 12:45 AM