Slashdot Mirror

Here's a revision of my original post (hopefully much improved) and a summary of the (on topic) discussion. Lots of discussion going on about 'folksonomies' - bottom-up taxonomies that people create on their own - as used in (recent web sites) Del.icio.us (http://de.licio.us/), a shared bookmarking web site referred to as "Delicious", and Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/), a photo sharing web site.

Folksonomies (the first meme of 2005?) is attributed by Wikipedia to Thomas Vander Wa.

Adam Mathes has a thesis on Folksonomies which examines user-generated metadata as implemented and applied in two web services - Del.icio.us and Flickr - designed to share and organize digital media to better understand grassroots classification.

IFTF's Future Now makes a point about problems with folksonomies: no synonym control ( "mac" and "macintosh" on Del.icio.us); no hierarchy and content types; and only simple one-word tags. Are these features or bugs? Consensuss says 'feature'. Andrew Ducker has a suggestion for synonyms and a modest proposal

Joho the Blog notices a discussion about what to call it in Mob indexing? Folk categorization? Social tagging?,
John Battelle links into Taggle and "federated tagging".

I wonder if a Google Suggest like system might reduce 'lazy tagging' ,and maybe synonym control when the federation appears.

New: In Beyond Laser Tag and Telephone Tag, JC Francois wonders if "2005 will be the year of tagging".

Will Folksonomies lead to the nirvana of the Semantic Web, or at least Semantic web light? (see : ftrain.com August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web)

Tag, you're still it!"

I don't think that is true. No company *has* to go public. Also if there is pressure from the SEC to go public, why did they reject Google's recent IPO bid?

It is quite true why they are IPO-ing now. I never said they "had" to go public. However, due to their size, the SEC is forcing them to release their financials to the public. This occurred back in April. They had two choices: release their financials and stay private, or release their financials and go public. Either way, they are allowing outsiders/competitors to see how Google is operating. By going public, they get the benefits of being a public company. There is only one company that has more than 500 shareholders and have not decided to go public: Levi Straus.
This Blog with link to Economist article talks briefly about it.
Here's another blog.
Better article about the regulation. -- The reporting standard also involves a significant added expense. Corporate attorneys say it can cost in the high hundreds of thousands of dollars for smaller companies and as much as $2 million for large companies. Many companies will go public before they have to deal with this reporting standard, they say.

Also, also, how would their competitors have an edge? They only have to disclose their balance sheet. That doesn't reveal any sensitive information that would benefit another company.

A lot can be deciphered from the financial reports. If you remember months ago on /. [How Many Google Machines, Really?], some guy had analyzed the number of servers that Google is using. Another beneficial information is how much ad revenue they are generating. This allows a company like Yahoo to raise/lower their rates to be competitive. Also, in annual reports, companies typically announce to the shareholders where they are headed in the coming year. All these information is quite useful for Google's competitors.

In regard to you comment as to why SEC declined their application is that they are currently still investigating whether the playboy interview violated the regulation preventing company officers from talking to the public about the company. However, they should approve it by the end of today.

In the end, they probably would have preferred staying private and not having to go through all this. In most situations, companies go public only to raise capital. Google is a profitable company and need not raise any additional funding.

Lastly, there have been a lot of negative news about Google since the IPO announcement. This is speculative, but I've heard that part of this is that the i-banking industry is angry/worried about Google's method of going public. Usually, when companies go public, bankers earn upwards of 7-10% of the amount that the company raises. However, by going Dutch auction, they only get 2-4%. With such a huge company going public, this is a big cut from their commissions. In addition, they worry that if Google does succeed, other companies would want to follow in their path and do an auction style IPO, further eroding i-banker's future profits.