RDeibel's Blog

Well!  That was a lot to process (especially all the stuff about types of tagging and bundles and stuff!), but I love the idea of a bookmarking site, since I often regret working at home and needing a bookmark that’s saved on my office computer, or vice versa.  This could be very helpful in keeping me equally productive everywhere.  (That’s a good thing, right…?)

As for tagging, it sounds like the next example of how the internet is making the world (or at least the world of computer users) very democratic.  Since tagging allows users to decide on how information is organized, it allows users to steer how the information travels between users.  Tagging sounds like another step in the “information by the people” direction.  Really, something like folksonomy is how all language develops, so it makes sense that this medium of communication would evolve in the same way–real people nudging things one direction or another by validating some things and letting others fall by the wayside.

I loved the suggestion that e-mails might be taggable someday.  That’d be a real improvement in my life to be able to categorize the tens of messages I send to students and mentors in the community every week.  I’m also excited about the possibility of using social bookmarking and tagging with my students.  It sounds like an excellent means of allowing them to learn to access resources instead of memorizing information (the real benchmark of a successful adult, I think), and it allows them to share responsibility for discovering new information and sharing it with others, something most of them find meaningful and exciting.

I’m very interested in trying social bookmarking and tagging myself, so I’m eager to get to Thing 7, although I’m a little unsure of whether a new tag writer can be a really insightful one.   (Happily, if we don’t get it just right the first time, we can edit!)  To write good tags, it seems the onus is on the tagger to think carefully about the audience(s) who might be using them, to consider all the ways the information might be used and by whom, and to check on how others have tagged the address.  I wonder whether I’ll find other people’s tags truly helpful, or so antithetical to my thinking that they’re completely unhelpful.   Likely a little of both.  That might be both a weakness and a strength of tagging:  the variety of opinions and perspectives out there yields a myriad of tags; that variety might be powerful, but it may also sometimes be daunting to sort through (just like the internet).  But if it helps me keep stuff organized–and there is so much stuff out there–I’m all for it!