Nov. 6: Shaker, Terdiman

Lee Shaker's article, "In Google we trust: Information integrity in the digital age," discusses the safety and reliability of Google and how the public's view of it is shaped partly by its financial success. Shaker takes a good look at Google through two years of New York Times news stories about the company. He finds that most (over half) of the stories within this two year period solely discussed Google's "corporate interests" (9). This, the author maintains, colors the public's view of Google and erroneously allows for its trust in Google to grow. Shaker discusses the framing of news stories and how, for example, using quotes from prominent business people (instead of getting unbiased views from many sides), who attest to Google's prosperity, further serve to exacerbate the growing problem of a false sense of trust based on nothing more than its fiscal profits. The author also considers Google's questionable privacy practices with regard to its users. He states that Google's "privacy policy makes it clear that it is a document to protect the company's interests first, to reassure users second, and protect users lastly" (5). Shaker wishes to stress that users of Google (as well as, I assume, other information providers) be somewhat wary and realize that media coverage of its financial success is not necessarily reason to believe that no information risks exist with using the product.

Daniel Terdiman's article, "Folksonomies Tap People Power," discusses the different tagging styles used in sites like del.icio.us and Flickr. The author explains that del.icio.us uses a broad folksonomy, meaning that many users tag the same item (in this case, a URL), while Flickr is a narrow folksonomy - small numbers of users tagging many different individual items (photographs). Terdiman notes that tag use is on the rise in blogs and other social sites and stresses that the more people that get involved, the greater the value tags will have.

I finally checked out del.icio.us after reading about it last week and it seems like a pretty useful tool for someone who a) either has a huge number of web sites s/he likes to keep track of, or b) likes to learn what other people consider valuable information about specific sites. To me, it's somewhat reminiscent of Wikipedia, where many people have the opportunity to create and edit information and, together, the information for the most parts remains reliable because it is under constant scrutiny. On the other hand, it doesn't look like users can edit others' tags so I would think that "bad" tags would eventually be phased out by "better" ones, if that makes sense.