Doug has a reference to Francine, who comments:

“For example, the “geotagger” on your blog sends back interesting information on user location, but…….so what? A cool piece of code, but with (to my knowledge) few applications for the blogger other than to satisfy curiosity. Don’t get me wrong, I too love these ‘gadgets’. Instead of seeing them as information tools, they are to me “inner circle” badges, blog branding, tag/links to and for the technorati.”

The “so what” with many of these gadgets and widgets– most of which are barely in their infancy– only becomes apparent as they are harnessed by through mechanisms overt and obvious, automatic and not. The geotag is a small bit of emanating information that can, ultimately, lead to widespread connections. That little bit of intelligence becomes another piece in a complex social mesh that no one has a handle on individually. It is the future of search, information, and digital identity precisely because Barry Schwartz is right: too many choices can lead to immense dissatisfaction.

The essential unhappiness of the informavore… one answer is to have fewer choices. Another, more likely answer, is to have more choices made for us without ever knowing they’ve been made. That’s where all of these sometimes seemingly pointless little ideas coalesce… not into a grand system (that was the delusional dream of the categorizers, the semantic web), but an ad-hoc system of systems capitalizing on these little things: tags and folksonomy, abstract and specific links, FOAF networks, shared resources and the connections therein as seen in flickr and del.icio.us and a dozen others not so obvious.

It has to be so because the old methods– keyword search of the corpus, information collection, categorization– are increasingly unsuccessful because they know nothing of attention and little of value. Most importantly, they don’t tap into the individual networks we create as we communicate and interact online. That’s where each of these little pieces to which we can say “neat, but so what” become radically important.

P.S. Sterling constantly makes direct reference (even reproducing the title page) of Bleecker’s “Why Things Matter” — see, for instance, the transcription of his great Etech 2006 presentation (which opened my mind to this whole area), including some of his illustrations.