TAGGING REVISITED

Tagging—that’s what I did when I worked for a drycleaner, many long years ago. I tagged, sorted, and bagged clothing, among other perfectly dreadful tasks. From what I can tell, not much has changed in the dry cleaning business, except that these days my dry cleaner’s cash register thanks me and says goodbye. As for the Internet, so much has changed that it’s a little daunting to keep up with it. Which brings me back to tagging. On the Internet, I tag once again, but it is much more fun than it was at the dry cleaners!

My return to tagging occurred just this past week, as I spent time on a site familiar to many, but new to me: del.icio.us. Wikipedia defines del.icio.us as “a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks." It is now part of Yahoo, and its acquisition by Yahoo remains the highest profile acquisition of its kind. At the risk of stating the obvious, del.icio.us is not the only social bookmarking web service in the land. There are others such as Furl and Shadows, many with a more targeted focus, and most of them unknown to me at this point in time.

del.icio.us, like Furl and Shadows, may be described as a broad folksonomy tool, which to my understanding means that there is a lot of tagging. Unfettered tagging promotes personal refindability and creates value for users. So says Thomas Vander Wal who is credited with coining the word “folksonomy” to describe what was happening on the Web. Wikipedia tells us that “a folksonomy is a user-generated taxonomy used to categorize and retrieve items from the Web, such as Web pages, photographs, links, and other Web content.” Obviously, a folksonomy is not a professionally developed taxonomy with a controlled vocabulary. From what I see on del.icio.us, that would be correct. With the exception of labeling suggestions that del.icio.us users are free to ignore, there’s nothing controlled about the labeling process on the site. Moreover, folksonomy should not be confused with folk taxonomies. True. According to Wikipedia, folk taxonomies are “culturally supplied, intergenerationally transmitted, and relatively stable classification systems that people in a given culture use to make sense of the entire world around them, not just the Internet.” What goes on at del.icio.us does not, at this time, appear to be a classification system for the ages. It seems more like a random cataloguing process that’s done by us, the folks, as George Bush 2 calls us. This process has its hazards. But, if you keep in mind that people like me are still writing down URLs or forgetting sites entirely, it’s a real boon to be able to tag and store web content in one tidy spot, and then share this information with others.

Ok. So what did I tag and why? Well, I tagged sites and articles—ten of them—that I thought might interest technical writers, of course. Have a look at my del.icio.us favorites. You’ll mainly find resources for web design and usability. Writers Write is a resource for all writers, including technical ones. I liked This Is Broken, a site where users can air problems of all kinds—bad experiences on the Web, bad customer service, maybe even bad directions produced by technical writers! I loved librarian.net. The feisty blog author, Jessamyn, has been “putting the rarin’ back in librarian since 1999.” Jessamyn focuses on the intersection between libraries and technology, and I tagged her blog because she said something somewhere in there to allay my worries about Web 2.0 and the seeming hodge-podge that is social bookmarking. In response to the question raised in the video, The Machine is Us/ing Us, and that is, who will organize all the anticipated content on the Web 2.0, our friend, Jessamyn, confidently answered “librarians will.” I was much relieved. While I love the idea of a read/write Web and especially enjoy bookmarking for my personal use, we just can’t organize the Web in this way, can we? Don't we need an electoral college of Web 2.0 to control the masses?

Well, maybe not. Maybe our collective wisdom will allow the cream to rise. Also, as regards to social bookmarking, think of the knowledge that may be shared worldwide by professionals, academics, and students, not so much so on sites like del.icio.us, but in other more scholarly bookmarking communities.

Yes, of course. But just as I am gaining confidence in all of this, The Philadelphia Inquirer publishes an article entitled, Wikipedia pioneer launches a 'better free encyclopedia.' I always wondered about Wikipedia. It's ok for some purposes, but it's no Encyclopedia Britannica. I don't think it's even the Funk and Wagnalis encyclopedia I tried to collect as a kid, diligently buying one volume a week at the supermarket, and hoping I didn't miss any. At any rate, you'll find the full article about Wikipedia among my del.icio.us favorites. Read it, and find out who killed and ate JFK!