The twist is that, while you invite responses with the tag “eli08fear” on del.icio.us, this post doesn’t carry that tag, either as category or tag or whatever WordPress invites you to call it. That’s interesting, because it suggests very different organizational spaces — one space for your blog, and another for del.icio.us. That might very well make very good sense, and I observe it not to say something is amiss. Instead, it might suggest something important about how documents on the web — and the relationships between them — might need to be organized. And so, all the things that people might post to del.icio.us would be on tagic to this post, even though they carry different tags.

I agree with you that “while we call this ‘social bookmarking’ we rarely think about what we’re doing as collective.” I think this may be due to the fact that the “social” in a lot of Web 2.0 tools seems to focus more on sharing than on collaboration (with the exception of wikis).

Which may be why folksonomy (which is excellent for self-interest uses and even sharing) doesn’t work so well for collaboration. You need to collectively agree on your tags to make the collaboration possible. You almost need a “consens-onomy”.

Seems like we are at the point where Web 2.0 tools are failing us. We have personal interactivity and sharing down (this is how I see Web 2.0), now we want truly collaborative tools. Maybe we need Web 2.5?

As an aside, Defending your Life is one of my favorite movies. I knew there was some reason I liked Gardner!

I’m definitely on board with the virtues of taxonomies…no need to convince me there!

Patrick

In terms of my original “why the _____ don’t people tag” rant, it has settled in that there are not singular answers; it depends on the group, it depends how the request/tags are disseminated, it depends if it is a temporal thing (tags for conferences, events) versus ongoing efforts.

I really appreciate Patrick’s analysis of folks/tax -onomies in the way these tags are used. My response is… well sometimes a taxonomy is good, right? The main reason for a fixed tag, cryptic as they become, is they serve as an over arching organizer and to help steer content to syndicated sites, etc.

And the beauty is, del.iciou.us provides room for both. For my “taxonomic” tags, I am still layering my descriptive ones on top, and they end up in the same, giant, “everything is miscellaneous” pile. While I am tagging things for this year’s horizon project (hz08) I am using sub tags to categorize those, free form ones so I can use them myself, and sometimes cross tagging with some of the other taxonomic tags I use for projects.

The unsaid thing is to be effective, I somewhat need to keep these things on the periphery of my consciousness as I scan the web- so when I tag I can remember our Horizon project, stuff I tag for virtual worlds, stuff I tagged for my visit to Australia, Martha’s presentation– what are the limits there? I dont know.

The almost last point, and getting at Jerry’s idea- the thing about it I love is it is quick (with a Firefox extension or a bookmarklet) so I can do so w/o a whole lot of interrupting of the flow of “looking at stuff”. So in some cases, you may get to the community involvement Martha is aimed at building, but that too takes separate time and attention. For many things, I just want to tag, let del,icio.us and associated tools, plugins automatically publish, syndicate, etc.

While I understand the reasoning Jerry put out, to me, it adds layers of complexity to the process- the person(s) maintaining the account have to process links (though in some cases editors may be useful) but you lose the immediacy of making resources available. The other downside is managing multiple del.ico.us accounts- as is, I have several accounts, and must keep them in separate web browsers.

Am anxious to see how the “fear” play turns out. Great concept!

Alas, to view tags for someone, you must be that someone. To get at that info, then, you’d need some middleware to grab and process stuff from that account. And, if one person wanted to make a whole bunch of things that worked that way, they’d quickly run out of email addresses for registering new accounts.

But the basic idea is good…I really do think this reflects an important Web 2.0 evolution: the discovery that tags only go so far, and then we need something beefier to pick up where tagging leaves off.

I’m workin’ on it…..

By sending to a person/organization in their network instead of having to assign a predetermined tag, this might be easier that trying to find/remember a specified tag (especially if someone has thousands of tags). I could image it being much easier to scan my list of who is in my network, seeing “eli08fear” and remembering that it is the right place to be sending this item to than scanning my list of hundreds of tags if I forgot which one it was, especially if the predetermined tag is a bit cryptic (as they often can be if you want to find something truly unique for your situation).

It might also work better since they probably have a smaller number of persons in their network to sort through compared to the number of tags they have.

This is really fantastic – I love this idea, and the Got Fear blog looks great and should work very well as a center for resources and discussion about individual items.

As far as the tag discussion, is there a significant difference if this process was changed slightly? For example, what if you created a del.icio.us account with the name “eli08fear” and had persons add that blog to their network and send “eli08fear” the relevant links. Instead of a tagging, the users are sending that link to a person/organization/class.

This process would not be as automatic as what Martha has set up because this would involve a “moderator” in the person of the owner of the “eli08fear” account to regularly check the links sent to them from their network, and approving them, but in some instances the moderation might be wanted/needed.