David Weinberger on Trees and Tags

JOHO – March 3, 2005. It is such a simple idea. Multiple categories for every item, it would be so easy to implement on the Palm categories – and they must. The full impact of tags is hitting me every which way at the moment, as is evident from recent posts. This item by DW alerted me to a frustration I have had for years. I want this weblog – and pretty much everything I do to be classified as psychology. However I do not want it to fall under health, or medicine, or marketing … so I don’t know where to place it on the tree of knowledge. It is never in the right place! Because I have a strong focus on cyberspace – the psyche of cyberspace – one might be tempted to put it under Computers or Internet – but there it gets lost too.

So thank god for tags. Now I will get this blog out there with the following tags: psychology cyberspace. I am not sure really how to do that. Where is the Flickr (or delicious) of blogs? Even more to the point where is the Flickr (or delicious) of blog *posts* ? Can we tag our posts in a meaningful way somehow? And then the big one – where is the Flickr of podcasts – Odeo?

As you can see I like Flickr.

David Weinberger’s item, is a part of Release 1.0 – so nice to have a bit of it outside of its container, (which I would love to be able to afford! )… he has interesting things to say in the article, but mostly it appeals to me because he has such a good grasp of it. Here is one bit:

The craft of creating and maintaining trees and faceted systems is well advanced and well understood. Businesses have been built around them. But we don’t yet know the outcome of the current infatuation with tags. The potential is real: If tag-mania continues, it will provide a layer of new metadata, generated by humans for other humans, that will invoke innovation and businesses – and problems – we necessarily cannot anticipate.

We have already started using Flickr as a marketing tool. Kate Tapley Horse Treks has it photos up there – I will be using it as the source for the websites. But the horse pix are tagged and I imagine horse lovers will find them and also find our website and may even come riding with Kate!

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