Archive for June 20th, 2006
P2008: Tagging the Race for President
Potential presidential contenders Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Mitt Romney, John McCain and Russ Feingold have all been slapped recently with the tag “p2008.” And no, we don’t mean graffiti artists spraypainting their campaign buses.
“Tagging” refers to the growing practice on websites like Flickr, del.icio.us, and thousands of blogs of letting users attach their own descriptive keywords to images, videos, links, books, blog posts, and articles. Tagging harnesses the wisdom of the crowd to classify and organize information. The practice has even given rise to tagging campaigns, where groups encourage web users to tag certain kinds of content with specific keywords.
For example, the folks at E-Democracy.org, a clearinghouse of online political information, are urging bloggers, linkers, and other netizens to apply the tag “p2008” to anything related to the presidential race — campaign sites, political blogs, news sites, etc. — thereby making such content much easier to find with search engines.
“World-changing” is now a marketing term
My friends over at www.worldchanging.com will get a kick out of this. The inside front cover of the July/August issue of Sierra features a two-page ad for Honda’s Civic Hybrid. Under the banner “Environmentology” (not quite sure what that means, but it sounds nice) artistically rendered in images of plants, the company rightly touts its 32-year history as a fuel-efficiency innovator.
Here’s the passage that caught my eye:
In 1974, Honda introduced the ingeniously simple Civic CVCC. World-changing (sic) for its fuel efficiency and low emissions, the CVCC demonstrated our spirited commitment to environmentally responsible technology…
“World-changing”? Maybe. While Honda has been a leader in green car technology for a long time, it’s important to note that average fuel economy across the industry, even for Hondas, is unsustainably low. Appopriation and imitation are of course the sincerest forms of flattery. Kudos should go at the very least to Alex and Jamais at WC for changing the lexicon. It’s nice to see Madison Avenue’s taking notice.
Foglio's Field Notes 