Yup, I've been busy & I will have a ton of links for you - that having been said, I'm finally cleaning up some gmail at home this evening & a fav source of mine (Good Morning, Silicon Valley, a leftover from my CA days, perhaps) reported the following story:
http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2006/07/is_that_a_wad_o.html
about Netscape paying off people who do social tagging. Here's one analyst's prediction about what paying off those who are actively online bookmarking and rating web content:
At J. LeRoy's Evolving Web, the host writes: "By introducing a profit motive into social bookmarking the entire system changes. Before 5:10 pm last night, social bookmarking was a reputation phenomenon. Your reason to bookmark was to get noticed. It was fun, you were part of a community, you got some fame -- but all of that was borne from your quality of bookmarking. ... Jason's motivation is a perfectly sound business decision. It is a disastrous community decision. The saving grace will be that, after Netscape has been gamed into utter irrelevance, people will learn something from the experience. The Netscape site will not be a trusted news source. People will return to sites with truer folksonomies."
Now here's where librarians come in. Yup, librarians. C'mon 2.0 wannabes, you know that you were waiting for an opportunity to play with the big boys. Let 'em try and "monetize" everything - one thing that librarians have ALWAYS done is to keep their integrity - to ignore the market forces and nonetheless adhere to the principals of finding and referring others to quality information. We've NEVER done it for money, never will. That, in and of itself makes us invaluable in a world of rampant capitalism. All of those pathfinders that librarians were building & so many gave up on a few years back - that will be back in vogue as librarians take back the decidedly unsexy but useful role of web cataloger. The users can trust us - they always have!
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