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Re-Information

17.Oct.2007

There’s been a major revolution happening on the digital information world. Just as digital storage is becoming cheaper and cheaper, the amount of information you can archive is nearly infinite. But there’s no use for content if you can’t find it. And when you have an endless amount of information this can get pretty hard. Using the old methods, you would just create categories, linearly to the amount of information. As soon as one category got too many entries, you just split it into sub-categories.

But content isn’t homogeneous, just like we aren’t, and using the title of a book mentioned on the video: Everything is Miscellaneous. However, physical restrictions still weren’t able to cover that truth. You can’t just put a book on sci-fi, informatics and foreign authors’ shelfs at the same time. Add to that different medias, and you have to decide weather you put videos, photos, books and works all mixed or separated. But when you really want to search on a subject, you just don’t care from where you’re getting information from, you just want everything.

New ways of indexing information have been presented, but one overcame on the new social web. Tagging gives a solution to the categorization problem, taking full advantage of the lack of physical restrains on the digital world. Now you can just tag the content with has many categories (tags) as you want and, instead of having to choose between all, it’s like you just created several copies of the content. If you search for any of the categories, you’re information will be there, whatever media it is using. A powerful solution.

The video covers most of this (re)evolution of information I talked about in this post. It was made by a group of students from Kansas State University, that regularly present their video productions on the Digital Ethnography blog, a valuable resource for interesting discussions.

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