People who deal with Internet stats on a daily basis should be realizing by now they need to find out ways of squeezing the juice out of all the tag-related qualitative data all over the web.

Sure quantitative data is ok, but when it’s about how people feel about your brand and service, corporate executives are always on their toes. We’re talking about very important qualitative data here.

Folksonomy shows no signs of slowing down, and people’s behavior has changed. They are tagging as they surf the web, just tagging along the way. And amazing things happen when a lot of people tag the same Internet content. You get the “collective perception” of things, which is a form of “collective intelligence”.

It’s time to pick up those Sociology, Psychology and Linguistics books and experiment with this brave new world of “organic data”. So don’t be shy, release the Internet shrink in you!

Here are some great examples of fun ways to play with this qualitative data:

- Top 10 tags for www.mtv.com on Delicious, saved 1558 times;
- 305 notes of people who have bothered to write about the MTV website in Delicious;
- Paste any text into Wordle and get beautiful visual tag clouds of whatever you want. Paste the presidencial candidates’ speeches for example, and compare the results side by side;
- But things can get even more interesting… like when you ask people to write the first word they think of when you show them a brand logo. Believe me, it’s kind of addictive. That’s what Brand Tags asks of you, and so far they’ve gathered 1.2M tags about brands. Just dive into their database and you’re in for a treat. Don’t miss out on Battle Mode, where two brands go mano a mano on a match for the user’s prefference. Here’s the current ranking.

The image above is a tag cloud generated by Wordle of this very post.

Is web 2.0 dead? Did it evolve to something else already, before we could find a buzz word for it? Whatever it is, I can’t say I like it. Are we prepared to loose all that was pure and that we loved and watch as corporations infiltrate and manipulate everything the long tail worked so hard to accomplish?

It seems to me that social networks are selling out and are opening their seams to company investment, making the participatory web more and more like the bad old days: monetization-oriented environments.

Facebook can’t resist product and brand pages, nor targeted ads. Flickr now accepts video, in an effort to seduce YouTubers into their platform. MySpace and YouTube wink at corporations, granting them access and tools.

Ok, making money is great, but in this case monetization leads to tyranny – which eventually will lead to a revolution caused by mass discontentment.

If things keep evolving this way at this pace, the chicken with the golden eggs will surely be slaughtered, and great achievements might be lost. Things should stay user focused, not company focused.

Converse brings a breath of fresh air to advertising by using Google Adwords ads as part of an online game. This is such a cool and fresh idea that it just might become a brand new usage for those tedious text ads.

But this isn’t the first time search engine advertising has served other purposes than those which it’s meant for… for instance, election polls can be easily done through a keyword advertising campaign. With a solid sample of thousands of clicks, the Internet users will eventualy declare their favorite candidates.

Ah, and it’s also a great tool for coming up with new brand names before they hit the market. For $100 or less you can get your own private focus group!

Thirty years ago, a guy called Gary Thuerk from a computer firm sent an email to 393 users on the US government-run computer network that eventually became the internet.

What a way to go down in History… “the father of Internet Spam”. Thanks a lot Thuerk!

As expected, the email was not welcome and people’s response to it was negative.

30 years later, an amazing 80 to 90% of all emails sent are spam and scams. Now that’s a lot of emails…