You are not providing a choice, just something that looks like it
has the same result; the user has no decision.
Yes, a user does have a decision. The user has made the decision to
use, or not use, the bookmarklet. The user has made the decision to
trust the knowledge and verbiage of other del.icio.us users. The
user can make the decision to go back and edit the tags later. This
bookmarklet isn't 'forcing' anyone to do anything. It is completely
the user's decision to go through with using it, potentially even
using poor metadata at the same time. I, and many other users, are
willing to sacrifice, what you see as, perfect metadata in favor of
speed and efficiency.
I have a question concerning these quotes of yours:
"Certainly if this was the dominant paradigm, the system would fail
overall."
"Same arguments as before. There should be at least some human
interaction here on the choice of tags, or it makes the system much
less valuable."
"This is the whole point of tagging. People add metadata so that 1)
they can find things and 2) other people can find things. You are
removing the step in which people add the tag metadata, thus making
the system less valuable to themselves and others."
How? How would this simple bookmarklet, that is used by a miniscule
portion of the del.icio.us population, making del.icio.us worse?
If we look at the two extremes:
1) All users use the same tag as the last user(s) every time they tag
a URL.
2) All users use completely different tags as the last user(s) every
time they tag a URL.
If #1 was '100' and #2 was '0', I'd imagine that del.icio.us would be
somewhere around 75-80. Now, even if my bookmarklet was somehow used
by the entirity of the del.icio.us population - I still fail to see
how a state of '100' would be completely bad. Obviously, not everyone
is going to use this bookmarklet.
The most extreme instance of using the bookmarklet will probably
forever be the bookmarklet URL itself:
http://del.icio.us/url/3f8993124abe4dc1cd4788e9471781ab
and even there - only a relatively small portion of the tagging
population ended up using it. And looking at the results, even that
isn't 'that bad'. (Stuff such as '!mobiledesktop' can be ignored,
that was a bug that has been resolved).
I will re-iterate: The use of this bookmarklet is completely up to
the user - nothing is being forced upon the user that cannot be
viewed, evaluated, or even changed. Additionally, it has no proven
detrimental side-effects, to the user his/herself or the community as
a whole. There is no logical reason that use of this bookmarklet
should be banned or its usage limited in any way.
John Resig
http://ejohn.org/
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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