This is going to come across as a crotchety old web geek rant, because that’s more or less what it is.

I’ve been involved in the online world in one way or another for quite some time, and the web in particular since 1995. I’ve seen a lot of things come and go, and one thing that has always amused and/or annoyed me is how prone web people (mostly a mish-mash of tech geeks and artsy types) are to fads.

A few in particular that, for whatever reason, seem of little value to me:

Wikis

Wikis are a bit difficult to explain to the uninitiated, but they are basically these odd sort of unstructured document-based web sites, typically designed so that anyone can add to or modify their contents. I definitely grok the collaborative editing aspect of the wiki concept (within reason and some exceptions), but for the life of me I have absolutely no idea why people are so enamored with their inherent unstructured-ness. In my experience, people plop all sorts of material all over the place, with no regard to location or context. Often, some information is duplicated while large gaping holes are left unfilled simply because the structure of the wiki’s design is developed organically (which rarely equates to “developed well”).

True, sometimes the content in a wiki can be quite valuable - I absolutely love Wikipedia, for example - but I feel that this is often despite the wiki design, not because of it. Who knows? Maybe this is a design implementation issue, but I’ve yet to see a wiki actually improve anything.

Tags

It seems that everyone and their dog is integrating tags into their content management systems or web services these days. I’m not sure I can see the point. I’ve yet to see a tag system work worth a damn, largely because unless tags are applied with dogged consistency they’re of no real use.

Take for example Slashdot, who currently lists among their recent tags “donteattheyellowsnow”. What in the hell is that supposed to mean? Sound advice, sure, but as far as I can tell it does not relate to anything I or anyone else would be looking for on the site. Some of the other tags make a bit more sense, but what’s to guarantee that all applicable tags will be applied to articles or (conversely) people won’t create additional tags with identical meanings? I quite honestly don’t understand the point. Why not create an all-inclusive list of useful categories and use them instead?

URL Shorteners/Redirectors

Granted, this one is a bit more obscure and mostly bugs me as I have to deal with their fall-out (URL redirectors are easily - and often - abused by spammers/phishers). Still, though, is it really all that problematic to give someone a full and direct URL to a web site? What is it about these services makes them so useful that the time it takes to set up the shortened URL is justified? This strikes me as a solution to a non-existent problem, similar to the notorious CueCat.

I’m sure I’m forgetting a few. Feel free to chip in via comments.