Meme: Semantic Drift

Alright, I'll take a couple minutes out of my day for a geeky little whine. But I promise, no fancy five-dollar words. That word "Semantic" in the title is the kookiest word in this post, although I was tempted to use the word "pejorative" in connection with the whole concept of a semantic web.

I'm all bunchy right now for reasons involving interwebs anxiety. I've been using del.icio.us and twitter and flickr and quora a lot lately, with pinterest on the horizon. You don't have to click those links -- those are just sites for collecting lots of fast moving things, like pictures or bookmarks or answers to questions, and they use "tags" to help you describe categories for your stuff that you're collecting.

This is a really really cool concept. For about 10 minutes.

Then reality sets in, especially if you use any of these systems for any real length of time. And you're as German as me. Inevitably I come up with some cool naming system for things -- lets say pictures from a family reunion.. I put people's names as tags and the event name. And then a few weeks later I decide I should add the location information too once I add pictures from another vacation. And then I wonder if I should go back put those tags on the pictures that don't have them.  And then I decide I want to add the year, because there have been more than one of these events.. And then someone gets married or discovers their ethnic roots and a few names change. Or my long-lost step-aunt emails me and says I mis-spelled her name in several places. And then I say screw it! There's no way I'm going to come up with a bulletproof "system" that doesn't need changing and is somehow remember-able.

I was less than 20 bookmarks into del.icio.us and already I'm changing my mind on how I want set up categories. I keep adding layers of tags and feel obligated to go back and re-tag things to keep some consistency. And I can see how this will get unmanageable quickly. Blech! And the wikis I have going are headed the same way -- what happens if you want to take notes on a book with 87 chapters and have a page for each? Oy vey, the overhead, the cross-linking, the epic drop-downs and hand-made landing pages. Mein Gott In Himmel!!

This is my amateur view on why conventional semantic web projects are just goofy -- the cost of maintaining necessary integrity in the face of inevitable change.  Imagine the picture above as moving object, with parts blinking on and off and reforming and relinking.

I almost get quora and pinterest (thx Sher for the link!), but not quite yet. I am a huge Wikipedia and Google user so some targetted primitive forms of this stuff make me mostly happy. My working rule-of-thumb right now is -- these model-driven projects are good if you have something specific you want and you have some loose search tools. Or if you're up for some eye-glaze surfing with no real objective. The need (desire! ja!)  for too much precision kills, though.  And the idea that I'm going to able manage any of these categorizing projects on my own is about as ridiculous as the idea that I'll ever organize my music collection. Or that I'll ever really unclench.