Hello,
First let me say that i'm a huge fan of del.icio.us, in special of the
way tagging is implemented on it, allowing tag intersections, and
centered on keyboard use.
Once i discovered del.icio.us (and also tagging), i came to a personal
conclusion that it is the ideal way of somehow organizing granular and
heterogenous data... thus being ideal not only for bookmarking, but
also for most information that we receive on a daily basis and is
bothersome to register on a hierarchical structure (creating a file in
a folder, defining the structure of folders, etc). I'm talking about a
substantial ammount of data that people would like archiving on a
long-term and somehow classifying it (despite of course being able to
perform a raw text search on the collection), but don't do because the
hierarchical file structure of current File Systems don't allow it on
a practical way, and also there isn't any application on the market
that allows it as perfectly as del.icio.us does for bookmarks.
The way that del.icio.us uses to sort bookmmarks is also the culprit
of my wishes: it is basically a blog with improved support for
post-categories (which would be the tagging system), on which the
posts are presented on the traditional reverse-chronological ('river
of news') view, which is exactly the way most of us do archive stuff
in real life: a pile of magazines with most recent on top, the office
paperwork with bills paid recently more accessible than bills paid
last year, etc.
If we add to this basic framework the ability to add specific
database-fields to entries that bear a specific tag (or even a
specific tag intersection), and sort the entries in that place not by
the reverse-chronological 'blogish' way, but by those datafields, we
have in hands a very general archiving system that also enables the
creation of very specific mini-databases on certain tags or
tag-intersections.
If we allow the ability to sync all the entries that bear a specific
tag or tag-intersection to a blog-publishing service, we do not only
have in hands a general achiving system, but also a blogging client, à
la Ecto and Blogjet. If the blog-publishing service allows tagging
like del.icio.us does, you could even replicate your local archive on
a weblog, if you wish.
If you allow this system not only to publish to blogs, but also to
subscribe to RSS feeds, you have an RSS reader that outputs the news
items relevantly tagged as the user configured. So all the items
received from Boing Boing could be automatically tagged: "feeds, boing
boing, webculture, geeky".
The same can be said for all situations where the user somehow faces
information overload, like e-mail. I really believe that a tagging
system that splits information in a multitude of user-defined
intersecting threads (tags) is the best way to offer relief to the
user in these situations, also allowing it to properly archive the info.
Recently, on GTD site 43folders, a site of some guy that is obsessed
with indexcards was featured. I think its sad that we have to see
things like http://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/ these days,
where software could do the job so much more elegantly.
If you are somehow interested on these ideas, you are free to check
out further disgressions about it on my blog:
http://indiegeek.blogspot.com/2006/08/taglogger-idea-for-tag-based-pimgeneral.html
http://indiegeek.blogspot.com/2006/09/notarius-system.html
Best wishes and merry christmas,
-Paulo
