Thanks to social networking sites like MySpace, FaceBook, and YouTube hundreds of millions of web pages are created. There is no end in site to this phenomena; which is good and bad.

Social networking has become so popular that it has become the single biggest reason for Internet traffic growth in the last few years. Social networking sites are the single largest generators of traffic on the Internet. Advertisers love social networking sites. Content owners love social networking sites. Professional entertainers love social networking sites. The average John Doe and Jane Doe love social networking sites – that 15 minutes of fame is so important. The problem is we have been inundated with so many pages for viewing that the experience of social networking has become a cacophony of sights and sounds.

The average user is bombarded hourly and daily with SPAM, ads disguised as emails, pop-up ads, etc.. The amount of information a user sees is akin to a physical assault on the senses.

In the beginning, the Internet was seen as a way of exchanging ideas and information. With its roots in the national defense and academia, the Internet began with lofty goals. However, the Internet is teetering on the brink of disaster. That disaster is information overload.

There is legitimate content out there; and there is a lot of it. There are creative artists seeking to express their views. There are consumer product companies seeking to sell you the latest and greatest of their wares. There are online educational institutions trying to reach those who otherwise would have no easy access to education. There are advertisers seeking to promote their products. Unfortunately, when faced with all of this, whether or not you mix in the bad with the good, all you see is chaos and all you hear is noise. There is just too much information bombarding the user.

When you log onto an email service, you are bombarded with advertisements, requests to install new toolbars, requests to answer surveys, pop-up ads of all kinds, etc., and that is even before you look at the inbox. This all occurs just when you finish signing in.

When you use a search engine to look for specific information, you are faced with a list of thousands and maybe even millions of search hits. Depending on the popularity of the topic and how well you crafted your search parameters, you could be facing hours or even days of searching for the right site. Companies seeking attention have found ways of using keyword search so that you end up with their site first on your hit list. Of course some search engines will jack you up to the top of the list for the right fee package.

The purpose of the Internet for most users is to find something or someone. In other words, people use the Internet to search for information. Advertisements for products and services are the typical search goals for the average user. In the day and age of broadcast television, cable television, broadcast radio, satellite radio, and online digital radio, advertisers push information to the user. However this information push has not underlying intelligence managing this “push”. Advertising today, even in all of these existing mediums, informs consumers about a product, about a service, or about an issue.

Advertising began as a way of educating or informing consumers. Advertisers take the approach that each ad is designed to inform and educate the user/consumer – this is Advertising 101.

The Internet is accessed by billions of people. The Internet is a new medium by which advertisers can reach their customers. Social networking sites have been the focus of much effort on the part of advertising community. Advertisers and social network companies have been working feverishly trying to monetize the hundreds of millions of hits. To date, advertisers have been unsuccessful.

Recently, advertisers have begun to mine demographic data from these social networking sites. The mining of this customer demographic data and the results of this data mining are the keys behind making the Internet a commercial success in the mass market. There are a slew of companies that purport to have tools to gather and measure consumer demographic data. Regardless of these tools the problem for users of the web and consumers who use the web is INFORMATION OVERLOAD.

So overloaded are users and consumers that the web is rapidly becoming an INFORMATION GARBAGE DUMP. Maybe a better description of what the web has become is an INFORMATION AVALANCHE.

The user and consumer have been abandoned.

Let us take a moment to think about how information is processed and what it is comprised of.

People Created the Information Avalanche

We know that people like to read and keep information that brings them pleasure. People process information on the level of element sets. However, this information is accessed on a transaction level.

As critical as I have been about the chaos of the web and social networking site in turn, the human mind is a repository of unstructured data. All of the information people retain and consider important is mind boggling. Of course, information that one person considers treasure is garbage to another. Bottom line information in the mind is unstructured.

Humans process and store information in their minds one way and yet humans require structure to access it or retrieve it in the real physical world. People go to places like libraries, museums, schools, and book stores where information is neatly categorized, classified, and stored.

Matters of Information Retrieval

There are numerous ways in which people retrieve information. Information retrieval is relatively simple when the data is stored and categorized in defined structure. People have over the decades relied on indices, catalogs, the primitive list, and the filing cabinet. These structures are part of a structure that facilitates access to the data.

Modern information retrieval uses version of the aforementioned for quick data retrieval. On the one hand, the ability to retrieve data has been made easier and faster but the volumes of data being created and stored have outpaced the ability to access the data. In other words, there is a widening gap between data creation and data access.

The most typical way of accessing unstructured data is via the search engine. It’s a data retrieved based on the different frequency/relevance algorithms

Access has become so difficult that the information available is reminiscent of a cloud. You cannot make out what is floating in the cloud. The cloud is constantly changing shape – hence it is literally shapeless. The cloud literally has no substance – it is vapor.

Numerous adapters have been created to bridge the gap between structured and unstructured information cloud. Several steps have been taken in data classification – hierarchical and then faceted classification from the top and folksonomies from the bottom.

A faceted classification system allows the assignment of multiple classifications to an object, enabling the classifications to be ordered in multiple ways, rather than in a one-way-only, pre-determined, hierarchical order.

What is folksonomy?

Folksonomy is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. In contrast to traditional subject indexing, metadata is not only generated by experts but also by creators and consumers of the content. Usually, freely chosen keywords are used instead of a controlled vocabulary.

Information that you cannot find when you need it becomes a lost data.

The Solution?

What is the solution to this chaos? The answer is a collaborative environment that bridge controlled vocabulary and folksonomy. Folksonomy, is collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social metadata. There are several sites that supports folksonomy and there are other sites built on controlled vocabularies. Can anyone name a tool out there that supports both hierarchical taxonomy and folksonomy?. None of the popular social networking sites come close to what is needed to restore order to the chaos.

In other words, we need a way of creating a system for collaborative tagging of data with ties to common classification. We need user created but controlled social metadata. Effectively a community of interested users tags the data. The wiki has become a commonplace way of tagging information.. However, wikis tend to be public arenas that have become giant chat rooms with very little participant control. What is needed is a way to narrow the tagging process in such a way that users tag data within defined categories. In other words we create a closed user group that supports just-in-time information delivery based on group behavior.

A new website called www.TabUp.com has hit the scene. The new online service focuses on providing collaborative tagging via predefined user groups. TabUp is further refining the tagging process. Part of what TabUp is enabling is that the user is part of an indexing and classification loop that continually refines the tagging of information. Call it Wiki Plus EVEN MORE.

TabUp is a pioneer in social collaboration. Are there other companies? Maybe. Investors who are seeking to monetize their social networking investments need to consider collaborative approaches now.