I believe a common effect of using tags in del.icio.us, Flickr, etc
is how we approach our data. Nitin points out that the Web 2.0 needs
Data 2.0 (and elaborates interestingly on this at his blog), but in
my view, this is merely a response to the overwhelming masses of data
that we're _actively_ engaging with these days.
We've had lots of data – digital photos, videos, documents, etc – for
many years but these would generally be put on a CD and stored like
any other physical item we have: in a simple, seldom-used system.
What del.icio.us and its brethren are introducing us to is a more
active mode of "ownership". You don't just bookmark (and never find
it again), you consider whether it's good enough to keep, title,
describe and tag it.
And hopefully you do something clever with it later on. I've become
much more active with my photos after beginning to use Flickr, and
now I want to tag and comment my photos locally and upload the ones
worth sharing with ease. Also, it's made me more critical of the
content I produce – I now want to take better photos, create more
interesting sets, collate similar items and engage more actively with
the data instead of just throwing it into a drawer. What can I do
with it? What can I learn from it?
When it comes to files I'm trying out all sorts of tagging,
automation and GTD-type mechanisms, using spotlight comments to tag
my files and constructing automator plug-ins to add multiple tags
quickly. And yes, I'd like a globally available tagger that lets me
append or search _everything_ based on tags, cluster these by time,
groups, type, relevance, etc.
But I'd also like to mark a text snippet with a tag, preferably
without extracting it from its context. I might come across an
interesting quote or piece of information that I'd like to check out
sometime later. If I could mark the text and tag it – just that text
– and also retain stuff like "belongs to [book title], [author],
[category] , etc" it would be readily available whenever I need it
without losing its context, which might tell me other things I need
to know.
I think we're on to a new practice of information handling. We can
easily imagine a modern Memex that stores all our tags, easily
creates clusters of information and media items that we can sift
through with ease en route to what we're looking for, from whatever
device and whatever place.
So the big thing about del.icio.us and its brethren isn't the tagging
or the sharing but the realization that we can organize our digital
stuff far better, and that it's gotten us into the habit of doing so
– regularly. We've crossed a threshold and started a paradigmatic
shift, and now we want the tools to make everything else work this way.
The file is dead. Long live the tagged item! ;-)
On 18. mai. 2005, at 02.49, Nitin Borwankar wrote:
Gen Kanai wrote:
Anselm,
Agreed.
Would you say that Apple's Spotlight in OS X and Google Desktop
are the first steps towards this kind of functionality in the
future?
On May 18, 2005, at 4:06 AM, Anselm Hook wrote:
desktop operating system... I'm tired of clunky web interfaces
that only
manage one kind of thing. That it took del to break ground here is
wonderful but... when is this stuff going to get into our
desktops - and
start to deal with the other qualifiers we use every day? I'd
like to be
able to set contraints like 'all things tagged blue, of this
mime type, in
this date range and authored while I was in france' etc. I'd
like this to
be the primary way I order _all_ my stuff... not just a novelty
for my
bookmarks. It is so matter of fact and so simple that it is
scarely worth
mentioning... yet operating systems that do this are still not
out yet.
Gen, Anselm,
I suspect that before this becomes ubiquitous at the OS layer,
we'll see this done in some sort of lightweight fast *cross
platform portable* application. Then I can use multiple versions
of it, one on my iPod, one on my laptop, one on my desktop, one on
each of my server apps on the 'net ( GMail, Yahoo ....). I should
be able to transparently exchange metadata across *all* the
platforms I use and sync across all these. Searching for
something on my iPod could suggest I go look on my desktop. Why
not ? Why restrict the scope to just one machine.
This issue of my tags existing in multiple places at multiple
scales and the technical problems created, I call "Data 2.0"
i.e. data in the folksonomy/Web2.0 world.
<shameless plug>
See my blog at http://tagschema.com/ and the article therein titled
"Web 2.0 needs Data 2.0"
</shameless plug>
As sexy as Google Desktop and Spotlight are, they are still point
solutions that don't encompass all my data - which exists on
multiple devices, at multiple scales, in multiple locations and I
need to be able to search across all of them transparently. OS
specific solutions do not work in this context, IMHO.
Nitin Borwankar.
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