Readings (7)

This week is all about tagging. Tagging is, according to Hammond et al, a hallmark of Web 2.0 because it “advances and personalizes online searching.”

I think that there are two reasons why tagging is such a big leap forward. First, because it’s social. The whole internet can see (by googling my del.icio.us user name) that I have saved a heap of articles on Hillary Clinton (or whatever other embarrassing interest). And second, because, as Mathes points out, it’s user-generated. I can remember my first cataloguing class, in which classification was described as “that which brings order to chaos” (or something like that). This traditional kind of classification rested in the hands of the controlling few, holding the fragile line against the barbarians and folksonomies. (That’s for you, Lauralee.)

The leap from private classification (my many folders of favorites, for example) to social tagging is what Jon Udell is writing about when he refers to Dan Bricklin's "cornucopia of the commons." The implications for feedback and for tracking who saves your posts or articles is pretty interesting too. The difficulty, I think, comes when your classification system is completely different than mine. One of the wonderful things about LC or DDC is that you can refer back to them. I can see people getting very confused by some of my tags/tags-to-be/strings of tags.

Hollenback’s article on ways to make del.icio.us was frustrating. All of these widgets sound fun and useful, but this is a lot of information. I’m still figuring how to navigate and organized del.icio.us: what the advantages are, and what my preferences might be. Joshua Porter’s article was a bit more accessible for me. His point about tagging being the secondary point of del.icio.us is important. He states that, “to think that people tag so that this information can be aggregated is to give people a trait of altruism they just don’t possess” and yet I think that this is the thrust of what the implication for libraries is—a new system of classification through aggregation, not individual classification.