I watched the Otter Group Del.icio.us tutorial (8 min. video). It was fuzzy, as advertised, but a good introduction. It’s creepy that of the several habits of highly successful Del.icio.us users Habit Five is “Stalk other users.” No wonder politicians go berserk over social networking. Why not call it “follow the recommendations of other users?” And I don’t get why randomly poking around in other people’s sites is any better than any other kind of random poking around. It must be some kind of hunter-gatherer impulse, like getting up real early on Saturday morning to beat everyone else to the garage sales. Us.ef.ul wasn’t – at least not for me I had no idea what the author was rambling on about.
I took a look around Del.icio.us using the iHCPL account that was created for this exercise. It was so good that I tagged it. Now I have a tag of tags, but I didn’t tag it tags; I tagged it iHCPL.
I clicked on a Generator Blog that has also been bookmarked by a lot of other users.*
http://generatorblog.blogspot.com/ *this url has been saved by 3175 people, and this is what some of them had to say:
= A source of a bunch of silly generating tools. -- Manzan
= Generators -- danieljames
= lista de generadores online -- miguelalas
= Generates software that create software – Neelakantan
= 專門介紹產生器的部落格 – Libraene**
= cool time wasting generators -- uncagedbird
**(I sure hope that penultimate one doesn’t say something really nasty in Chinese)
I learned that Tag or Folksonomy are trendy new slang for "words." As in:
“word, n. II. An element of speech.
12. a. A combination of vocal sounds, or one such sound, used in a language to express an idea (e.g. to denote a thing, attribute, or relation), and constituting an ultimate minimal element of speech having a meaning as such …
b. (a) As designating a thing or person: A name, title, appellation. Obs. (b) As expressing an idea: A term, expression.
c. A written (engraved, printed, etc.) character or set of characters representing this.
a1000 Riddles xlvii[i], Moe word fræt. 1521 [see WRITE v. B. 2]. 1612, 1888 [see SPELL v.2 3]. 1725 WATTS Logic I. iv. §1 We convey [our Ideas] to each other by the Means of certain Sounds, or written Marks, which we call Words. …” Oxford English Dictionary.— 2nd edition. –
Tags are, in effect, what used to be called with justifiable distain, “quick and dirty cataloging.” It’s quick to create at the front end, but not very effective as a finding aid due to its lack of precision and standardization.
Q. Do you look under:
a) car or
b) cars or
c) automobile or
d) automobiles, or
e) motor vehicle
f) motor vehicles
g) all of the above?
A. g) all of the above, however, the thing you really wanted to find was tagged “Station wagons.”
The big difference between then and now: the faster-than-human gathering and sorting ability of the electronic digital computer and the linking together of lots and lots of these now commonplace replacements for typewriters and adding machines together in a global network. Still, I wonder, are tags any more effective than a key word search as a finding aid? I look forward to the investigation.
My favorite site for tags, formerly known as subject headings, is still: http://authorities.loc.gov/
My other favorite site for words, after the OED, is Urban Dictionary, http://www.urbandictionary.com/. Where else can you find a definition for "delurk" or "multislacking?"
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