Clay Shirky (commentator), Stewart Butterfield (Flickr), Joshua Schachter(del.icio.us), Jimmy Wales(wikipedia)

Wikipedia categorization started last summer. English was chaos for some weeks. It self organised quickly but took a while to rationalise.

Stewart. Tags are not necessarily a replacement for categories. 200,000 tags.

Joshua. del.icio.us started with a personal text file with 20,000 url entries. Then he started adding #tag on the end so that he could do search and replace. Then it became a web site. Then multi-user. What's interesting is community behaviour where people group round a common tag that means nothing in itself. JB: I love this! This is how open source software gets written. It starts with a personal itch that you can't stop scratching. And often because the simplest possible tool you're using doesn't quite cut it any more.

Flickr: People using the comments attached to a photo or tag to have a conversation. So the tag or photo becomes a placemark for an on the fly discussion board.

Q from Marc Canter: Can we share tags across systems? Technorati already doing that. (Incidentally, arc keeps asking this and I don't get what he's asking for)

There are no bad tags. As long as they are useful for the user and there is feedback they will tend to be good enough. There is still a UI problem with finding things tagged with say Java when people used JDK. making it useable relies on clever UI around "Related" tags. "the point wasn’t to let you find all and only pictures of elephants, it was to give people better tools for organizing their own pictures, it was a happy accident that it worked across users. "


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[ 16-Mar-05 9:36pm ] [ ]