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Tags R Us
One of us began the New Year with a resolution to explore the world of tagging. That's the place where people publish URLs of their
favorite websites, instead of leaving them inside a browser on a specific workstation. Del.icio.us is one popular tagging site, on-line since 2003 and now owned by Yahoo.
Tagging is still a new area for Knowledge Street, but even with just a bit of experience, we think it's pretty cool. Instead of working with a single, hierarchical stack of Favorites, you can tag
a site with multiple terms. That means it can be in more than one place at a time. The only limitation is that tags are single words (“HowTo” is OK, “How To” is not). It's easy enough to learn the ropes
by looking at what other taggers are doing, and that's where the social networking aspect comes in. A tag like "KM" naturally leads you to Knowledge Management types, thereby giving you some
insight into what like-minded people think is worth saving.
This informal collection of tags is called a folksonomy -- a "taxonomy" developed not by experts, but by plain folks. One way to look at the folksonomy at Del.icio.us is the "cloud" view, in which the size of the word indicates how often it's been used. That's a good place to start. Or you could read this Pew Internet Report on tagging, which we found while flying through that cloud.
Tagging is something that lets
people create a personal (yet shared) space, in which they can put forth their own opinions, learn from what others are doing and watch the shape of things as they evolve. Perhaps not the most
significant advance of the past 100 years, but definitely worth a look. We tag, therefore we are.
Money for Nothin’
In the past week, the phrase "domain monetization" floated by in an email from our own
hosting company, and it was frankly new to us. In fact, it's one of the fastest growing forms of web-based business.
If you own a domain name that can draw traffic (for whatever reason), that's
all you really need. You can park it someplace, and fill it with pay-per-click ads. People come looking for something, stumble across the parked domain, and click their way through to someplace else. The
host domain offers no content at all, but with the right name, it can make a lot of money. How about taxes.com? You'd expect that to be owned by a large
accounting firm. But it's not. It's just a set of click-through ads for other tax business.
For that matter, how about del.ici.ous.com? If
you read the previous article, you know about the tagging site del.icio.us; this .com variant
is obviously designed to intercept people who enter the real del.icio.us name incorrectly. There's something a little unsavory about that, but there's no law against it. The monetization players have been so successful that the domain resale market now has a real business model. It's even attracting the interest of venture capitalists.
Lists of Many Colors
If you're actively engaged in the spam wars, you're probably aware of blacklists. They flag IP
addresses associated with suspected spammers, and Internet Service Providers use them as a way to filter incoming mail. If a message originates at a blacklisted server, the ISP can bounce it and keep it
out of your In Box. It's not a perfect approach, though, since list errors can also block legitimate traffic. Blacklists sometimes flag ranges of IP numbers, too, so your own mail might be blocked even
if you're entirely spam free. It's the email equivalent of having your credit denied because you live in a bad neighborhood.
The inverse approach is something called whitelisting, in which users
define people and domains from which they're willing to accept mail. If you're not on their list, your email is automatically rejected. This can help keep spam under control, but it also makes you a tad
inaccessible. Whitelists need active maintenance, and may keep you from making connections you'd actually want to make.
A third approach is called "greylisting." If email comes from a known sender -- someone you've gotten mail from before -- the filter passes the message
directly to your In Box. If it's from someone new, the filter holds the message and asks the sender to retransmit. Most legitimate servers will do that within an hour, and when the second copy arrives,
the filter lets it pass.
However, most spam is sent by zombie mail servers, which don't bother with re-sends. There's no confirmation copy, and the message is deleted.
Some greylist
filters claim to reduce spam by as much as 90%. What's interesting is that they're not trying to analyze the content or look for key words or otherwise deduce what the message is about. It’s strictly
based on whether the sending server behaves itself.
A Bird in the Hand
...is worth two in the bush, of course. Proverbs like this are trying to capture some kind of
fundamental understanding in only a few words. They're nuggets of knowledge, in a way -- easy to remember, easy to pass on, and memetic enough to be understood even as fragments. If you're making the
first pot of coffee at the office, a colleague might say "The early bird, eh?" No need to finish the thought. Of course, if you stumble in around 10:30, the same phrase has a different spin.
It's strange, though, to consider how many proverbs have meanings that are entirely at odds with each other. Remember that many hands make light work, but don't forget that too many cooks spoil the
broth. You know that he who hesitates is lost, but don't forget to look before you leap. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, but it's better to be safe than sorry.
What are we to make of this? Is
it a reflection of the fundamental duality of life, or a sign that we really don't know what we're talking about? When you have a few minutes, see if you can come up with your own list of 10. If you get
stuck, this is the largest collection we found while Googling.
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