I talked about tagging a little bit in my last post. It's pretty cool; it makes photos searchable, which is a brilliant development. But tagging gets even more clever with services like Delicious and Citeulike. Social networks + tags = social bookmarking. That's what Delicious does: it links you tag sites, see other people's tags and explore those tags. Essentially it's a social network, but it's tagging, so less risk of funny looks at interviews than, say, a photo of you rolling around drunk. That said, it probably isn't wise to do silly things like tag illegal music sites. Anyway, these social bookmarking sites have huge potential. Here's why.
The ideal and default setting for Delicious is "public" i.e. anyone can see your tags. That's significant. Put it this way: you are researching a project that the whole class is doing. You tag some sites with Delicious and your friends see it. They have also tagged some sites, and you all find more and more interesting sites and here's the really clever part: it's all organised in tags, so it isn't nearly as chaotic as bookmarks. A Latin dictionary with dozens of tiny bits of paper with no meaning sticking out of the top versus all the words you need to know being subdivided and labelled by context and urgency - and you can search it. It's a no-brainer. Here's an SPS Classics Delicious page.
This is changing the way we think about information. With the advent of Web 2.0 and specifically services like Delicious,finding information was a tedious, slow, laborious process. You go to the library, find the reference card, fiddle your way through the Dewey decimal system which is still the preserve solely of librarians and geeks of the first order and find the book on the Battle of Hastings you were looking for is somewhere in the middle of the German manga. You are only allowed this book for a short period of time and then you are told that your account expired seven hours, four minutes and thirty-nine seconds before you tried to take out the book. Immensely frustrating, the whole procedure. Delicious takes this process, blasts it to smithereens and reassembles it in a new and far simpler manner. But here's the crucial part: information used to be created and dished out by a class of people who were specific to this task. Now, information is ours to contribute, distribute and classify. If Galileo surfed the web, there would be little to stop each one of us collating the information he had published and/or garnered from the internet, and if we did this with lots of great thinkers and revolutionaries, just think of the sheer volume of previously priceless information at our fingertips. This guy calls that a "folksonomy" and believes we can use it to take over the world (Part 1) (Part 2). A system was recently revealed at TED whereby all the world's digital photographs online are hyperlinked, creating a 3D image of the world. That's unbelievable, and ten years ago it couldn't have happened. The information hierarchy is no more. Delicious makes information more readily classifiable and searchable and the power which comes from information and knowledge is now in our hands. Roll on the knowledge revolution...
This is changing the way we think about information. With the advent of Web 2.0 and specifically services like Delicious,finding information was a tedious, slow, laborious process. You go to the library, find the reference card, fiddle your way through the Dewey decimal system which is still the preserve solely of librarians and geeks of the first order and find the book on the Battle of Hastings you were looking for is somewhere in the middle of the German manga. You are only allowed this book for a short period of time and then you are told that your account expired seven hours, four minutes and thirty-nine seconds before you tried to take out the book. Immensely frustrating, the whole procedure. Delicious takes this process, blasts it to smithereens and reassembles it in a new and far simpler manner. But here's the crucial part: information used to be created and dished out by a class of people who were specific to this task. Now, information is ours to contribute, distribute and classify. If Galileo surfed the web, there would be little to stop each one of us collating the information he had published and/or garnered from the internet, and if we did this with lots of great thinkers and revolutionaries, just think of the sheer volume of previously priceless information at our fingertips. This guy calls that a "folksonomy" and believes we can use it to take over the world (Part 1) (Part 2). A system was recently revealed at TED whereby all the world's digital photographs online are hyperlinked, creating a 3D image of the world. That's unbelievable, and ten years ago it couldn't have happened. The information hierarchy is no more. Delicious makes information more readily classifiable and searchable and the power which comes from information and knowledge is now in our hands. Roll on the knowledge revolution...
This is pretty good.
ReplyDeleteYou make some good points about how social bookmarking can change the way we access information, but you sort of assume that the reader understands what tags are and how they work. I think to clearly draw the distinction between the "old way" and the "new way" in terms of organisation, an explanation of how tagging one thing with multiple tags might have been good. You use good links and pictures though.
A