Essay 2 - The content quality

Social media technology allows everyone to develop and upload on the web his own content, so the total amount is so big that the first thing to do should be classify, to put a little order in all that stuff. The best part can be done using a folksonomy, wich is "is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. Folksonomy describes the bottom-up classification systems that emerge from social tagging. In contrast to traditional subject indexing, metadata is generated not only by experts but also by creators and consumers of the content." (wikipedia). So this shows that one easy way to describe the contents that are on the web is to leave all in the hands of the consumers, that are those who will enjoy these contents. Is this sure? We can say yes, if the people that collaborate in tagging are in a great number, so that useless or wrong tags haven't a heavy weight and don't affect the classification work. This classifing work must be done with a lot of different people so that all different points of view can be considered; indeed any content on the web can be visited by different people, different by a lot of feature (sex, culture, provenance...). By sure some web sites gives different roles in tagging and judging other people's work. This means that the users are reassured that if a content is high rated, this means that it's an high quality content. Different roles can emerge also in little communities such forum, where every user posts comment and, since the community is small, anybody knows how relevant it is.

Now we can ask why classify content? Just rating isn't enough? The answer is no, because another important thing is finding out what a user is really looking, so if we talk about social media quality, we cannot just consider the quality of the content (a nice shot, great video or a working solution for a problem) but also if it's linked with what we were looking for. This means that for a well described request (e.g. a query on google), we expect a correct answer to be shown as the first answer; this can be done with all the work described above.

Of course classifing isn't enough: this is a new and totally different scenario, where anybody can do information with his own content. There's no more only the traditional information system (TV, radio or newspapers), there's internet too, and the credibility has grown up immediately, because people trust what other people post on the web, even more than old information system, ad shown in the image below (taken here)

even if noone really assures about the content, except other contents and this is a chain where any link is based on the link before; are we sure that there aren't any weak links? That's why web sites such wikipedia uses references and external links. This is a reason why great company preferes going into the web and post by themselves their content, instead of leaving this job to user: they just want to be sure about the contens posted. To have a glance just go to youtube and check some video clip: a lot of them are posted by record company. This guarantees quality (I'm really seeing the video I was looking for) but cannot spread out to all the web of course and, in a certain way, it's better not to be in that situation, because the power of internet is to give voice to everyone; voice to answer to uncorrect and low level contents too.