Disaggregating the Web: The Space of Tags

Description:

Abstract

This paper offers a disaggregated geography of the web. As the web continues to undergo a process of information centralized and aggregation where a select number of info-providers, (typically portals and search engines, but also consumer related sites such as Amazon, Ebay and social networking sites such as MySpace) accumulate and categorize content and users profiles, new possibilities for web research emerge at the level of web code. Disaggregating code from information powerhouses such as Google typically requires the development of research software, know as 'code scrapers' or 'rippers'. Researchers at the Govcom.org Foundation or the Infoscape Research Lab (Ryerson University) have developed a number of such 'scrapers' for the academic community. Such small scale experimental software programs, in short, scrape or parse all the 'tagged' information categories found on a site, sorting them into spreadsheet formats for subsequent analysis. For this paper, we are particul arly interesting in disaggregating geographic tags from the top tier of information aggregators. What can such tags tell us about the dissemination or the origin of aggregated web content? Do geographic tags mask or otherwise obscure web users knowledge of the geographic information economy?

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