After going through and analyzing five chapters of Weinberger's ideas and trying to relate them to the "Web 2.0" and "Web Squared" articles, I found many connections. The connection I am going to focus primarily on for this post is the Web 2.0 and Web Squared's concept of collective intelligence and suddenly having all of this combined information made possible by technology. With all of this miscellaneous information, it needs some sort of organization or order to sort through it all. As a result, this is where Weinberger's idea of 'tagging' or 'third order' comes into play.
Weinberger's third order doesn't force data into categories but instead tags it. Wikipedia would be an example of data forced into one specific label. Tagging doesn't have those restrictions. For example at the top of page 92, Weinberger states that "Tagging lets a user of online resources - Web pages, photos - add a word or two to them so she can find them again later (Weinberger 92)." In other words, this concept of tagging can be used in music, movies, class websites, and just about anything on the World Wide Web. Delicious.com is a perfect example of how tagging can be amazingly useful and effective. It is a bookmarking site that allows the user to list web pages that he or she might want to go back to. To help you find the sites you've bookmarked, Delicious allows the attachment of whatever words you want to place with that link. For example, if I wanted to bookmark the Washington State University website, I would tag it with "Wazzu" or "WSU" or "Colleges". This concept is so useful because it allows the user to tag things his or her own way, making it unique and easy to remember.
I’ve never used Delicious, perhaps because the name puts me off somehow. I should probably check it out though because it sounds like it would help me out. I invariably run into all sorts of neat sites that I would like to revisit… sometime. So I bookmark them all and end up with a uselessly bloated Favorites list. On top of that I often cannot remember what any of the sites were for so I have to go through and revisit them all just to figure it out.
ReplyDeleteTagging really seems to solve the basic problem of organization, particularly the whole “lumping and splitting” and the problem of what to do when something is like these other things in some ways and unlike them in others. Do you put it with them anyway, leave it separate, or lump it into a third similar group. With tagging you can do all of these at once; an “object” (i.e. piece of data/metadata) can occupy multiple places in an organization and be easily found by anyone, wherever they might choose to place it organizationally.
I agree with the importance of tagging and bookmarking. I have about 50 websites on my google toolbar that i have tagged and refer back to when i need to. It would be so difficult to try and tag the decimal system with EVERY related piece of information inside. Computers take the mental part out of having to memorize and now have made us functional- To succeed we must know how to navigate such a program of information to gain access to what we need. I am curious when, and if, we are going to run out of combinations of tagging space. There are so many websites that are left and I wonder if they just sit there, forever enduring mass growth around them. That is where the spiders come in, what a complicated task to even imagine!
ReplyDeletenice example! had never heard of delicious, went to the site, and it looks like a very useful tool, thanks!
ReplyDeleteI agree as well that tagging is very important, especially for businesses who are trying to get as many hits on their site as possible. They have to tag their site in strategic ways so more people will see it, and the more it will pop up in google, bing, yahoo, (whatever you may be using) searches.
Without a large amount of interest in a single subject, tags can bury a document as surely as putting it in box labelled "anthrax" and burying it in your backyard.
ReplyDeleteImproperly tagged material is just as hard to find as miscategorized material. This is going to become a real problem when software that purports to auto-tag material for you becomes more common.
I'm really interested in the pros/cons of user tagging. I see Tom's point here, but I also see your point. I guess I wonder at what point we move from uselessness to usefulness in terms of tagging....or do we ever? Do we need a system to make it work? Good post overall. I would've been curious to hear a bit more about specific connections to the Web2.0 & Squared articles.
ReplyDeleteI like how Alicia mentioned her how she has fifty websites on her toolbar that she uses frequently. I am the same way, the way I stay organized very much pertains to the online. The way folders and files are organized on my computer I am sure deal with many similar properties of tagging. Tagging is monumentally important to the web, something that is poorly tagged will likely disapper in the void of the internet and never be found by people other than those who posted it.
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