CLICKHERDER

Fellow clickherder.com author Michael and I had an interesting discussion about 1000tags.com the other day. The first part of the conversation ended with:

Michael: dude, read the faq already.

and the second and final part of the conversation ended with me saying:

Joel: dude, this is just plain stupid.

No expert on folksonomies I, but I have a couple of notes to sound. I don’t exactly argue that 1000tags.com won’t “work” in some sense of the word “work.” After all, there is no accounting for taste. The million dollar home page (I simply refuse to link to that miserable site) is apparently very successful for the site’s creator(s). But the verdict is still out on whether a 10×10 pixel ad on a site whose main appeal is novelty is a good advertising spend. Me, I still lean toward putting former VC’s in placards on the street corner.

1000tags might enjoy the same kind of “success” which the m$hp enjoys, namely, success for the site’s creator. But the site styles itself as a sort of folksy social experiment, or perhaps a folksonomic commercial experiment. From the FAQ:

1000tags.com is a project that aims to put to the test in its simplest form the viability of tagging as a way to advertise, by presenting a tag cloud formed by tags added by people who try to promote a particular site or page.

My main irritation is that this “folksonomy” really isn’t. Rather than evolving from the way that average users use the site, it evolves in response to how advertisers use the site. If more advertisers buy into a tag, the tag’s font gets bigger. I am skeptical of any advertising venture in which prominence depends on what other advertisers are doing instead of what the marketplace is doing.

Further mucking the folksonomics is the fact that advertisers can, if they have the cash, buy exclusive use of a specific tag, with a font as large as their pocketbooks. This is where I lose all faith in 1000tags’ “project” or “test.” This is about putting casinos’ and porn sites’ advertising dollars into 1000tags pockets and not much else. If it looks like the internet, it’ll be the supply side of the internet, and not the demand side.

Filed by Joel at 6:36 pm under Web Marketing
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