I haven’t written anything substantive in months. Work, the holidays and so forth have kept me plenty busy. For a while now, I’ve been meaning to blog some of my thoughts on tagging. I’ve been gardening my tags for over two years now. I’ve watched others use del.icio.us and experimented with my own techniques. Two techniques I’ve tried are pre-coordinating and post-coordinating tags, which I describe briefly below.
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I broke into the top 100 del.icio.us users this week, according to CollaborativeRank. Not much else to say – I just thought it was interesting to see how I slowly worked up the rankings (I was originally near the bottom of the top 500).
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I’ve been watching del.icio.us develop and flourish for while now. Ironically, the wisdom of crowds really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Maybe all web apps experience this same effect: the dark side of the long-tail. Users test out the app and abandon their accounts. Spammers flit from one account to the next like bees pollinating flowers. Whatever the reason, there is a lot of junk in del.icio.us. The majority of users don’t tag their bookmarks at all, which begs the question why they are using it in the first place. I don’t have an answer to that question, so I will suggest what I think is a more important question: Given that a majority of users are not contributing anything (or are actively sabotaging) the usefulness of this collective tool, how do we use the tool effectively in spite of them?
This individual used del.icio.us to tag a page with every unique term used on the page, or so it appears. Interestingly, in this case, the terms are generally illustrative and distinctive. But talk about bad cataloging practice. What’s the point of cataloging something with all its terms when we have full-text search?
My work recently shifted from the comfortably concrete world of Web sites and portals to the cloudy conceptual world of enterprise information architecture. The folks I’m working with are in records management, enterprise architecture, Web, IT, and management. There are even some librarians in the mix. The various groups each speak their own lingo and have trouble understanding one another’s motivations, processes, and deliverables.