We came across this the other day – an engine for searching the social bookmarking commons. Gataga allows you to search by tag across several popular web-clipping services including del.icio.us, furl, and others. Gataga’s simple interface looks a lot like Google’s, but the similarity ends there. The only ranking system is time – the most recent links come up at the top. So Gataga is a nice tool for the moment’s glimpse of the links people are saving, but that’s about all.
Bit by bit, the web is being catalogued by its users. But at the moment, Gataga (and the rest of these bookmarking tools) works more like a wire service than a library. Tags are sort of like a reporter’s “beat” and Gataga provides RSS feeds for all possible queries, so you can track areas of interest. But if you want to use it as an archive, you’ll have some pretty serious digging to do.
In the early days of the web, sites sprung up like Voice of the Shuttle (VOS) that thoughtfully catalogued interesting links. The fact that there was a single editor ensured that things stayed fairly organized, that broken links were repaired, and dead ones pruned. But as the web grew, the model quickly became unmanageable. Alan Liu, who single-handedly managed VOS from 1994-1999, said it came to the point where he was spending 2-3 hours per night simply combing for dead links. VOS allowed the community to suggest sites, but the burden of organizing, annotating, and “weeding” fell solely on Liu. The rise of blogs made it easier and less stressful to gather links, but ensured that it was a casual affair – a kind of day-to-day grazing. Of course, all blogs have archives, but they are not terribly useful (Dan talks about this here).
With social bookmarking, we seem to be laying the foundation for something more sustainable – “the only group that can organize everything is everybody.” The next step is for librarians, archivists, and new kinds of editors and curators to start making sense of this wilderness of tags.