Tagging Social Collaboration through AJAX and SOAP

That's a heck of a title, isn't it? Some people might think that cleanliness has something to do with social collaboration - and it certainly does. But the reason I am writing this post is because I found something funny. Really funny. In fact, I still chuckle when I think about it, because it was days ago. You non-techies stay with me here, because non-techies will find this especially funny.

Josh sent me something that had me in stitches. First, let me introduce you to the gut-wrenchingly amusing collaborative network. Round edges coming soon. You got it! And if you really read it, not one single part is amusing. What is amusing is that someone took the concepts of AJAX, Collaborative, Social and tags, and made an outstanding spoof of something Venture capital and funding agencies keep falling over themselves to get into.

Next year we might have collaborative networks with SHAMPOO, DEODORANT and COLOGNE or PERFUME. It's a completely different language, and sometimes people really need to realize how silly they sound. Ajax is Ajax to most people. A cleaner. People use that to scrub toilets. At least SOAP is something known to make people smell better. Usually.

Tags are what people put on wild animals before they set them loose to observe them.

Social networking existed before the computer. It may even predate the spear. The same goes with collaboration.

The buzzwords are senseless. They are so senseless that Wankr^beta is hilarious, because there is way too much focus on a lot of these things. I feel like disassembling a few myths before I go to sleep, just so I can sleep instead of laugh.

Tags

Like tags. If you have a website and you know how to tweak it, you know about meta-tags. If you have a blog, you know about technorati tags, or if you don't, you've heard about them or seen them or become violently ill due to misuse of them.

The 'Semantic Web' makes sense, but it's easily abused. People will jump up and down and talk about how easily abused the Wikipedia is, but they will turn around and talk about how great tagging is. Hypocrites. Listen - it's the same thing. Tags allow people to say, "This subject is related to XYZ" by giving it a tag "XYZ". It can be a meta tag, a technorati tag, or a Wankr tag (which I do not believe exists...). But these are all ways of making indexing the web easier.

Then along comes someone who figures out the system, and games it for their benefit. They sell books on how to do that for everything from Google Adsense to search engines to Technorati.

Let's clear something up. If you want to get visits to your site from Technorati, you use technorati tags. When you want to get visits to your site from search engines, you use meta tags - though they are more fickle. The key difference is that Technorati tags are only good until other people don't bury your reference with their own use of the tags. Meta tags work the other way, usually, where the older your page is the more people that will find it in a search engine.

Considering popular technorati tags can be off a page in an hour, well - that's the value of technorati tags. They are as good as long as someone searching doesn't give up. Considering most bloggers try to write short, tight posts, you can expect that other bloggers will not skim to page 10 to see what you had to say about origami. And in a search engine, well - you won't get too awfully far if your content sucks.

Sucky content can do good in Technorati or in a search engine. In fact - sucky content bubbles to the top. Maybe that's where SOAP and Ajax come in. To get anywhere, you have to have both tags and tags. Or you can just ignore the things, and let people bumble in on their own. At the end of the day, word of mouth is still more important than tags. Really. So you can tag yourself to death.

AJAX

OK, Ajax is a type of client side scripting. That's all it is. How it does it is beyond what most people care about, but it gets it's name as an acronym for the tools involved. It's supposed to make interactive forms easier on the internet by allowing changes to be made by the user without having to download another page in the web browser. That's all it is. You can call it George if you want to.

So What's The Point?

The point is marketing. If something sounds cool, people will think it will make them cool if they use it. This has been historically proven untrue. A yuppie on a Harley Davidson is not a biker from the days of Easy Rider.

The only thing that has changed are the mechanics of how things are done. At the end of the day, most of these changes are not big deals, but people will tell you that they are. But they aren't. At the end of the day, there will be new names to contend with and they will mean just as much as the old names.

What the question should be is what something does, not how it does it. The entire internet is already tagged social collaboration. Except some people want to understand these tags, and why would they want to do that?

When you can answer this stuff, you'll know what the names mean. ;-)