I'd Tag That

Tagging. This trendlet of Web 2.0 pretty much snuck up on me. But it's great. I spend all day categorizing every little thing, and it turns out I'm working for Yahoo! for free.

Being the savvy software engineers that we are, my coworkers and I sort of missed the initial advent of folksonomy. I guess it got its start as we became slaves to the ID3 tags in our MP3s - it's certainly the first instance I can recall of regularly obsessing about metadata while not at work. Then, with blogging, each post fits into one or more categories. Finally, Flickr catches fire, emerging as much MMORPG as photo service.

But for me, it finally hit home with Delicious. I had been reading about it for months, mostly from Mac enthusiasts (though I don't think there's a particular reason why that should be). After a painful couple of hours tagging all my bookmarks, I am good to go.

It takes a bit of a mindshift to move from the tradition of bookmarks in a single folder to bookmarks having multiple "attributes" (e.g., your old familiar bookmark Music -> Technology -> Recording -> MacMusic.org may now be tagged as Macintosh, Recording, with Recording bundled under Music). And storing bookmarks on a central server (admittedly not a new concept) and available as an RSS feed is hella convenient.

The strength of folksonomies really arises from group collaboration. The action begins when I subscribe to the Delicious accounts of my friends so I can:

1. See what they are adding
2. Import and tag their links
3. Promote general homogeny and lack of exposure to different lines of thought

Fun!