Social Networking Gets Traction
During the calendar year of 2005, a plethora of social networking sites came alive, experimenting with advanced ways to share information on the internet. One of the most interesting developments was the introduction of social tagging, in which new and highly innovative sites such as del.icio.us brought forth the concept of posting your tags about sites on the web so they could be shared by any user.
Social tagging is definitely a disruptive technology, and will make a distinct change in how people think of using internet technology. Imagine having access to your favorites folder from any computer and sharing the links important to you in a particular topic area with colleagues around the world. It is a scheme for defining metadata by popular demand, without a formal construct. It helps make sense of the ever exploding set of resources on the internet, leading to a taxonomy of mutual interest. Social tagging led to the introduction of the notion of folksonomy to introduce an innovative concept of metadata designed by the people and for the people.
The innovative work of del.icio.us was not to work in vain for very long, as only a month ago this new introduction to applying the web was gobbled up by Yahoo along with its acquisition of flikr, the photo sharing site that had similar attributes. Google and Microsoft are not far behind, as the competition for exploiting this interesting technology heats up. Microsoft has built a feature into its experimental Windows Live service to let you access your favorites folder from any computer that can get you to the internet.
Social tagging has applications in law enforcement and justice enterprises as people tag information of interest to a case or set of cases. The metadata issue in law enforcement has long puzzled crime analysts who have searched for effectve ways of classifying criminal events so as to facilitate searching across crimes to find suspects.
The problem with such an unstructured approach is that there is no discipline in defining metadata in a way that helps solve the searching problem, and without concurrence on a taxonomy or ontology the search is not likely to be complete. But even this problem may fall to the technology embedded in the semantic web which will raise the use of metadata to a new level of sophistication to overcome inexact taxonomies.
We have not yet seen the applications emerge or common use in law enforcement of these concepts, but clever crime analysts will find ways to use this technology to increase correlations in unstructured data about crimes.
9:50:20 PM 
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