There’s an article over at Many-To-Many, “ The Innovator’s Lemma“, which caught my attention this morning.

There, Jay Fienberg wrote in a comment (emphasis mine):

I would argue that, ironically, the usefulness of the tagging systems in Flickr, del.icio.us, and Technorati is that these systems remove the “same freedom to classifying” already available on the web, and constrain tagging within a more traditionally controlled system.

Hmm…this sounds to me like maybe the problem isn’t that people can’t tag or otherwise describetheir data accurately enough, but rather that for the Average User, the tools have been largely non-existent until now.

Even if Flickr, del.icio.us, et. al. all eventually collapse under the weight of their own chaos, they will be remembered in much the same way that Lotus 1-2-3 is still remembered as the Original Spreadsheet–it wasn’t the first (That was SuperCalc), but it was still the first one to produce an accessible accounting tool and, as a result, awareness of spreadsheets to the masses.

Gopher may have been the first attempt at an Internet-scale hierarchical classification system, but these days, outside of fora like this no one has ever heard of it. The population of the Internet was only about 1% of what it is now when Gopher effectively died. Flickr, del.icio.us and even Wikipedia will have the honor of being remembered as the “first” in the public’s eyes, not because they were actually the first but because they were the first to offer it as a tool which was grok-able to the Average User.

The Average User doesn’t want a good tool–he probably lacks the sophistication to know if his tool is good or bad. What the Average User wants is the same tool as his friends are using. That way, when one of his friends figures out something clever, he can leverage that discovery with a minimum of effort.

So now that the tools are out of the box, the Kayak Metaphor is the only one that’s left (unless I want to come up with some lame metaphor about a car with a stuck accelerator, no brakes, and broken tie rods, and the only working feature being the Hi-Beam switch for the headlights, but I think that one’s been used too much already).

I tend to laugh at people who fret about people being able to Do As TheyPlease with technology for two reasons. First, because I used to be one of them; and second, because if people didn’t keep creating new problems, no one would pay us to solve them.