<sigh> I got too attached to the title "Folksonomies of Folks" for my Metadata Schemas and Applications paper (due tomorrow - that is, in 11 hours!). As a result, I find myself now writing a paper on and folksonomies in online dating sites.

They suck. They all suck. I'm serious. There are a few good ideas, but generally they suck.

VerbDate throws the term "tag" around, but it, like, _so_ doesn't get it. Heck, there aren't enough users, so one of the 'popular' is "looking for a guy who can make me laugh and is not still living with his parents". There's no way to get a cloud of just the most popular - you have to know what you're looking for. There's no easy way to add to yourself. And here's the most brain-dead thing of all: you can't tag other people's profiles! No , no folksonomies, nothing. Zilch.

RogueConnect's stuck with its fashion focus. Not bad, but too visually-oriented for any real depth. Unless you're the kind of person who likes only Armani-wearing people, that is. Or at least people who say they wear Armani. The only interesting thing here is that the site creator's noticed people are more comfy blog posts than they are people, so that's something cool there. But aren't front-and-center on people's profiles, and they're anonymous. So no folksonomy for you, either.

ConsuMating _almost_ got it right with weekly polls and questions to encourage people to keep developing their profiles. Then the service shoots itself in the foot with its business model limiting you to 10 free messages per month, which naturally drives all these users to make their free communication tool, polluting the for individual users and making it imposssible to get a quick idea of someone's interests. Oh, you can't tag someone with a tag they already have, so you can't see who else thought someone was cool, so you can't follow the links to find out whom else _they_ thought was cool, so you can just forget about social filtering. Heck, you can't even pull up a list of the people _you_ cool. Not that there are ever any cool people on these social networking websites.

It's all messed up. And to think CNet actually bought consumating, sucky domain aside...

Aiyah.

On Technorati: tagging, folksonomy

Random Japanese sentence: 犬か猫か鶏を飼うようにしなさい。 Try getting a dog, a cat or a chicken.

A penguin with a tape recorder or speech recog. Right. That way, I could rant about all this brokenness, and that would help me organize my paper.

Hooray for mindmaps, at least. And hooray for iPods, or I'd go mad.

Must find Web 2.0 person or other geek whom I can call up late at night to talk through these things.

Oy.

On Technorati: rant

So I'm just going to have to do this from memory, and without screenshots. Mumble.

I scribbled down a whole bunch of things earlier. That makes it ridiculously easy to just chew through the bunch, writing a paragraph or so on each point. I can edit it down to the right length and add proper transitions later.

I don't think linearly. I can't sit down and write something from start to finish. I jump around, I get distracted, I need to explain things to people (or penguins)...

On Technorati: writing