How people agree to certify a new word
Apparently 800 people not only read Jesse James Garrett’s blog post that introduced the concept of Ajax, and they went to the trouble of linking to it and tagging the URL, but many of them didn’t tag it with the term “ajax”.
Popular tags get set quickly, but not in stone
It only took 10 users for ‘ontology tags folksonomy’ to sort to the top of the tag list, meaning that even a small group of users can pretty quickly create much of the consensus value around a given link. This is in keeping with the idea of lowest common denominator tagging. However, though this consensus was established quickly, it was not frozen, with the positions among those three words varying, and with tags eventually replacing tagging.
I’ve only found one popular link so far that violates this idea, for the original Adaptive Path piece on Ajax. For this link, the tag ‘ajax’ is overwhelmingly #1, with 1171 occurrences from 2352 taggers. (Second place is ‘javascript’, with a mere 644 tags.) Yet over 800 people, more than a third of the total, tagged it before ‘ajax’ hit the #1 spot — it’s as if you can see Ajax becoming a real term as enough people read the article. The Ajax article may be a one off, or there may be some small but instructive number of links whose consensus view changes slowly, documenting the rise of some new concept.
This is a good example of how assigning meaning to a term, or a word, is a social activity, one that evolves over time. The importance of an article depends on how many people cite it, but people will start citing an article once other people have agreed that the article is important. I’m fairly sure this process of feedback will be found for any word, idea, or article that people have agreed is important, and in fact, the feedback itself is pretty much the same thing as social recognition of importance. (Obviously, for technical terms, only those with the technical skill to follow the conversation can agree or disagree about somethings importance.)