Zeit·geist (tsÄ«t’gÄ«st’, zÄ«t’-) n.
The spirit of the time; the taste and outlook characteristic of a period or generation.

Zeitgeist is a term that refers to the ethos of a cohort of people, that spans one or more subsequent generations, who despite their diverse age and socio-economic background experience a certain worldview, which is prevalent at a particular period of socio-cultural progression.

The Web 2.0 trend, as first postulated by Tim O’Reilly, is now being discovered and championed by a new era of internet entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs and companies have already attracted interest from more established players in the online arena. This is exemplified by Yahoo’s purchase of Del.icio.us, Flickr and Upcoming.org. Sites branded “Web 2.0″ are experiencing phenomenal success on the wave of enthusiasm associated with the social, sharing nature of the new paradigm.

A subset of the Web 2.0 ‘Zeitgeist’ is the concept of Social Bookmarking.

What is it?

Social bookmarking is a popular way to store, classify, share and search links through the practice of tagging them with informal assigned, user-defined keywords that describe their content, and saving these bookmarks to a public website. This is in contrast to the classic idea of bookmarking, which is the practice of saving the website address to your web browser.

To create a collection of social bookmarks, it is necessary to first sign-up to one of the many providers, add tags of your choice and designate whether the bookmark is public or private. Some of these providers periodically verify the links to ensure they are still available and verify users if the URL no longer exists.

Most social bookmarking services allow users to search for bookmarks which are associated with given “tags,” and rank the resources by the number of users which have bookmarked them. Many social bookmarking services also have implemented algorithms to draw inferences from the tag keywords that are assigned to resources by examining the clustering of particular keywords, and the relation of keywords to one another.

Who is doing it?

Social bookmarking websites are now numerous and include, but are not limited to: Del.icio.us, digg, furl, blinklist, blinkbits, blogmarks, reddit, fark, de.lirio.us, newsvine and ma.gnolia.com.

How does it work?

The creator of a bookmark assigns tags to each resource, resulting in a user-defined method of classifying information. Tags are one word descriptors that don’t form a hierarchy and as a result a resource can have as many tags as is necessary, with these tags being modified and deleted as required. So, tagging can be a lot easier and more flexible than fitting your information into preconceived categories or folders.

If you save an article about how to make a certain kind of cake, you can tag it with recipes sweets yogurt or whatever other tags you might use to find it again. You don’t have to rely on the designer of a system to provide you with a category for French cake recipes. You make up tags as you need them, and use the tags that make the most sense to you.

This is a great method for organising data. When someone else also classifies their resource with the same tags the result is a collaborative repository based on similar ideas and creative thoughts. This concept has become known as a “folksonomy”.

Why is it significant?

Social Bookmarking allows different users the opportunity to express different perspectives on the classification of a particular resource. The process also allows like minded individuals to form communities that continue to influence the evolution of folksonomies and common tags for a particular resource. Therefore, using folksonomy tools, relationships between different subjects are created in interesting and previously unrecognised ways. For example, if you are researching television, other users may have seen the connection with video podcasting, taking you to new, potentially valuable directions. These tools also encourage return users as the folksonomy of a particular topic is continually changing and evolving in interesting and exciting directions.

What are the downsides?

By definition, social bookmarking is carried out by amateurs therefore there are no standard set of keywords (also known as controlled vocabulary), no standard for the structure of such tags (e.g. singular vs. plural, capitalisation, etc.), mistagging due to spelling errors, tags that can have more than one meaning, unclear tags due to synonym/antonym confusion, highly unorthodox and “personalised” tag schemas from some users, and no mechanism for users to indicate hierarchical relationships between tags (e.g. a site might be labeled as both sport and rugby, with no mechanism that might indicate that rugby is a subset of sport).

Where is it going?

The shift from formal taxonomies to a folksonomic approach to classification has important implications for how users interact and how communities are developed. As more users come online, more blogs, wikis and other resources are created, this new form of classification will mature, ultimately influcing how information is stored, how those storage engines are designed and developed, and indeed how that information is found.

Web 2.0 will alter the way that businesses develop and apply innovative ideas.

During the 1990s business leaders and venture capitalists grappled with how they would make money from the web. This was tipified by the two VCs, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, investing $25 million in Google in the late 1990s; they new the search engine created by Sergey Brin and Larry Page was a winning formula, even though the pair had not yet monetised search. Bricks and mortar compaines were deemed “old hat” as the dotcom bubble was expanding. Companies such as eBay, Amazon and Yahoo! were at the forefront of every investors’ chequebook. Every company needed a 21st Century “Blue Sky” web strategy; every company needed to do e-commerce. However, the bubble burst and everyone was brought down with a bang. Boo.com is a classic example of the fallout from the over speculation.

Today, the reality has shifted from solely bricks and mortar or dotcom, to a balance between the real world and cyberspace, of traditional business operations complemented by the unversality provided by web-based technologies. The web has given businesses a greater understanding of their customers. With Web 2.0 a new type of web is emerging, further enhancing the understanding of a user or customer through the creation of online communities, where information is shared and new ideas evolve.

There are numerous examples of web communities from the early FriendsReunited to MySpace and the more specific Islandoo for the Channel4 TV progamme Shipwrecked. Web 2.0 is all about collaborative networks tipified by Flickr, del.icio.us, Wikipedia and YouTube. However, Web 2.0 has primarily been used in the consumer arena, as identified by the examples, but the use of such technologies has far reaching implications based on understanding how people interact with the technologies and behave online. Linking people across countries, time-zones and company boundaries will enable people to work together without hierarchical boundaries, bringing people together as one team to collate the best input. This is emphasised with the concept of a wiki whereby any end-user can make changes to the shared resource without the need for specialist software and expensive training. This makes sharing knowledge extremely easy.

Other areas of Web 2.0 is the technology identified by the term “folksonomy”. Simply, a folksonomy is defined on Wikipedia as:

… an Internet-based information retrieval methodology consisting of collaboratively generated, open-ended labels that categorize content such as Web pages, online photographs, and Web links. A folksonomy is most notably contrasted from a taxonomy in that the authors of the labeling system are often the main users (and sometimes originators) of the content to which the labels are applied. The labels are commonly known as tags and the labeling process is called tagging.

While it takes time for an expert to create a taxonomy specific to a particular organisation in order to categorise or define data, folksonomies do not require fixed taxonomies. Instead, users define their own descriptions of the data to be described by applying tags to the data, whether it is a bookmark in terms of del.icio.us, an image on Flickr, a video on YouTube or a document in a company repository. Over time, these tags can be amended by other users resulting in a definition that is more specific. This enables users to find information with relative ease, without having to type the exact keyword.

Web 2.0 will bring a whole host of issues into the business arena. While there are clear benefits from establishing communities and social networks, people with different views, be it political or religious, can drive the agenda. Further complications arise through the necessity to audit changes to the data and ensuring the data is indeed accurate (Wikipedia has had cases where people have maliciously altered data to either enhance their own profile or devalue the significance of historical events).