The Changing Face of Search, Tony Rusell-Rose along with Udo Kruschwitz, and Andy MacFarlane have penned a post about changes they see coming to search.
The entire article is worth your time but one part stood out for me:
… Personalisation does not mean that users will be required to explicitly declare their interests (this is exactly what most users do not want to do!); instead, the search engine tries to infer users’ interests from implicit cues, e.g. time spent viewing a document, the fact that a document that has been selected in preference to another ranked higher in the results list, and so on. Personalised search results can be tailored to individual searchers and also to groups of similar users (“social networks”). (emphasis in original)
[Users don’t want] to explicitly declare their interests.
This has implications for topic map authoring.
Similar to users resisting building explicit document models and/or writing in markup. (Are you listening RDF/RDFa fans?)
Complaining that users don’t want to learn markup, explicitly declare their subjects, or use pre-written RDF vocabularies, is not a solution.
Effective topic map (or other semantic) authoring solutions are going to infer subjects and assist users in correcting its inferences.