Nick Carr writes that search and tagging don't matter.

He's right and he's wrong. He's right: tagging doesn't matter. He's wrong: search does matter.

Tagging doesn't matter because it banks on a critical number of users becoming taggers. This makes the assumption that the majority of web consumers will be active users who take the time to invest in tagging. In my opinion, this seems unlikely; most users won't put in the time to tag, as the perceived benefit of doing so won't warrant the investment -- especially for the more casual web users.

Search, however, does matter. Whatever hardware apparatus you use doesn't matter; it's the information transmitted that you're looking for. So whether you're on a handheld PDA or you're on a web browser, you'll still need the information that Google can give you -- especially if it's YOUR information, like your personalized google search history, your gmail account, your gtalk account, your orkut account, your ad words ppc account....you get the idea.

Saying search will be commoditized can only hold true if the information you're searching for is commoditized. But if the information you're searching for is your own distinct information, it's anything but commoditized. It might even end up being the most valuable thing around.

Featured Reports

• Web 2.0 and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy [1]
• Culture 2.0 [4]
• SEO 2.0 [5]
• Publishing 2.0 [7]
• Real Heroes [1]
• The Mythology of Web 2.0 [4]
• Psychological Warfare [6]
• Superhero Marketing [5]
• Inverse Universe [6]
• Platform Strategies [6]
• Unclassifiable [6]
• Searchonomics [7]
• Open Source Strategies [12]
• Google [42]
• On Innovation [124]
• My Mistakes [9]

• Yo, Peep This: RSS Feed