After attending a couple of related conferences this past month, Search Engine Strategies, and Computers in Libraries, one of my big take aways about what’s going on in the really big, big picture is that one really good thing that all of these new technologies and user generated content is doing is unleashing our imagination. And that, of course, is a good thing.

I mean, sure we can have (and do experience) information overload, and today we even have “innovation overload” to some degree with our feeling that we have to find and try out all the countless Web 2.0 tools, widgets and applications being developed.

But imagination is something that we really can’t ever have too much of….

This Guardian piece titled Wikipedia’s School for Scandal…by Seth Finkelstein is worth reading, perhaps if nothing else to ponder the truth of the statement that “…one lesson from all these scandals is yet more evidence that Wikipedia fits a familiar pattern of idealism being vulnerable to exploitation”

Much of the culture of the Net has been built upon a kind of idealism, especially in relation to people offering their time to contribute content at no charge….

I should note that I came across this article today by getting recommended to it by one of the people I “follow” and trust on Twitter: Jason Calacanis. Another example of a type of “social graph search”,and something I will be discussing in some depth in the May issue of The Information Advisor.

On another note regarding whether idealism will and can work on the Net, I am attending a lecture later today by a professor in Media Studies in SUNY Buffalo, Trebor Scholz, who is giving a talk at the New School here in New York City that looks like it will be on a topic I’ve been wondering about recently: the labor implications when Internet users that contribute their time and efforts, at no cost, help firms “co-create” their products on the Net. The title of his talk is

“What the MySpace generation should know about working for free”

I need to do a lot of reading of articles, newspapers, blog postings, etc., and these days the way I get to most of it is that I collect in one big batch, and once a month print it out to read on the train trip I take back to Rochester from my monthly faculty meetings at The New School in NYC (These days, I’ve found that it is more reliable and enjoyable to be on a train for 7 hours then to take a 1 hour flight from New York, with all of the delays, hassles and discomforts!).Anyway, this last ride home among the reams of print outs, one statement in particular in one article jumped out at me as being both prescient and rather nerve wracking. An article in the Technology Quarterly section of the Dec 7th Economist on mobile social networks made a reference to the fact that today we tag content like blogs, pictures, and videos, but we don’t tag people. (See: Playing Tag) Hmmm… not yet!

Will we all soon come across tags not only that describe articles, photos, and video clips but people we’ve encountered too? Will we all start carrying around labels of how others see us? “thoughtful”, “unreliable”, “hard working” “boring”?

It seems that there may be several converging trends that would drive things in this direction: celebrity culture; exporting our social network profiles around the Net (following the concept of Open Social Networks); young people using social networks for identity creation and self branding, and the growth of trust rating systems like Trust Plus that ask us to rate the reputation of others.

From a researcher’s standpoint, there could be some potential value with this. For instance, if readers were able to rate and tag the professional quality and characteristics of specific authors, writers, etc. of market research reports, business analyses, etc. (Some of this is in fact already implied by Web 2.0 like sites like PressDisplay that automatically rank news articles by the popularity of a particular writer).

But tagging people about their personal characteristics? What will your tag cloud reveal about you as a possible date, employee, thinker, or human being? Of course, probably nothing truly - personal tags are likely to be the most unreliable type of content on the Net–won’t they?

But something like this is bound to occur and there will be a lot of mischief attached with the tag.

Jeffrey Rosen, John Battelle and others have warned us not to make assumptions about people based on their clickstream; it will also be true that we won’t want to judge a person by the digital tags others hang on them either.

In a recent subscriber survey I did of Information Advisor readers, I asked what kinds of responsibilities readers were expanding into outside of straight business research. One of the top responses was doing more training of other staff members.

I’ve been looking into the training possibilities of screencasting for an upcoming issue of the Information Advisor, and it seems that this technology is still underutilized. It has great potential as a training tool, and offers particular promise in teaching a wide range of aspects of Web searching and issues related to Web 2.0.

One short screencast on the basics of Web 2.0 that has been making the rounds over the last few weeks that I found to be absolutely beautifully produced and very compelling was created by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State, and is called The Web is US/ing us. I highly recommend viewing it to get some inspiration.