> If delicious had a recommendation system for untagged pages, that > would be nice. Well, actually it may not be as useful as you think. > Sometimes I tag my bookmarks in another language. Will this proposal > extend to other languages? > > Even so, if the recommendations disappear after the first person tags > it, then this feature would have merit.
Too much synch creates groupthink. As Pietro[1] and Terrell[2] have shown, tag clouds move to an organic distribution pretty quickly, and disruptions to those distributions, as with Pietro's Ajax example, are informative. All this happens without formal recommendations or coordination. Surowiecki would say that this happens *because* there are no formal recommendations -- in the 'Wisdom of Crowds' view, this sort of decentralized independence makes tagging more robust. And I'll argue that having better lateral diffusion of common tags, or even recommendations for untagged pages, risks creating a 'naked mole rat' scenario. Mole rats are effectively clones of one another, in the manner of eusocial insects such as bees. Because they are so genetically similar, they have far higher risk of group infection. If the "tag DNA" of a URL is made less variable because of reduced independent choice, that seems like a big risk for such a small pinch of syntactic sugar. -c [1] http://blog.pietrosperoni.it/2005/05/28/tagclouds-and-cultural-changes/ [2] http://www.terrellrussell.com/projects/cloudalicious/ _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.del.icio.us/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
