Tagging

While people tend to think that I am an early adopter, I am not. For one thing, I am too poor to be an early adopter. I am naturally pretty cautious — almost in spite of myself. So I am late to the folksonomy stuff. Sure, when they were launched I played with del.icio.us, and flickr, but only in the last few weeks have started using them in earnest. (OK, not flickr, but as space on my own server disappears, I’m going to!)

But 43 Things is the thing that pulls me over. Since I was a little kid, I’ve made goal lists, and the ability to see and -steal- borrow from others’ life goals is really interesting. As is the equivalent of life goals recommendations (“those who want to become president also are interested in trying new foods”).

I think the bottom-up taxonomy is one that benefits naturally from the use of computers. There’s a big push toward tree-based concept maps lately, but the killer medium for that form of information organization remains butcher paper. The gradual organization from the bottom seems well fitted to tagging. I’ll be interested to see the ways in which people refine this basic process to allow for better social understanding of concepts and relationships.