Entries Tagged 'Tagging' ↓

in the last few days was the acquisition of del.icio.us by Yahoo! that was announced on Friday.

but Tom Coates continues to do some of the heavy thinking required to consider some of the recent innovations in new-ish webstuff. This time it’s about tagging: Two cultures of fauxonomies collide. What’s refreshing about Coates’ writing is that while it’s not academic in nature (much more accessible and not nearly as onanistic as much of the academic work in the domain), neither is it obsessed with the commercial side of things – his posts aren’t about the next business model or monetizing X or Y.

an interesing followup to his earlier article on folksonomies and tagging in general: Remove Forebrain and Serve: Tag Clouds II. “The intellectual problem is that tag clouds create a data world where subtopics are detached from their parents; where the very notion of parent/child relations no longer exists. The counter-argument is, who cares?”

a few people have noted misgivings about the article by Janice Fraser that I linked to last week; notably Andre Torrez, maker of a great number of really cool things on the net. See also Kottke’s A whole new internet?. I still like Fraser’s piece, but it doesn’t capture the whole story – the story you already know if you’re a maker of things on the internet. But for a non-maker audience – reader, community participant, casual browser – I think the piece does have merit and is still worth a read.

of Adaptive Path: It’s a whole new internet. As usual more technically-inclined people will scoff at this (and they have been dismissive since JJG’s article on Ajax a few weeks ago), but they miss the point.

Tag clouds are the new mullets. “It is of course wrong to compare weighted tag clouds to mullets, mood rings, and similar instances of mindless pop-cultural detritus. Tag clouds are not dumb. Their smartness is why so many have rushed to use them. But ubiquity and repetition quickly turn sweets to ashes.”