Tag State

Jack has pointed me towards this Thomas van der Wal article on the state of tagging. The more I see it, the more I get interested in tagging. From what I can see, tagging has 3 primary uses:

1. Retrieval

The first and the most obvious. Do it, tag it, lose it, find it. This is primarily a personal activity and it doesn't require that you share your tags with anyone else. Tagging is therefore part of Personal Information Management

2. Sensemaking

So what happens when people share their tags with others? If they have some nifty analytic or visualisation software, it allows us to see what the informationscape of a team, a department, an organisation looks like. The world becomes cloudy. Folksonomies can be created that feedback into official taxonomies. Rather than tell people about ourselves in LinkedIn or Facebook profiles, we can expose ourselves through our tag scapes. Whole new vistas of investigation & deception become possible. Do we tag something because we think it's interesting or because we want to other people to think that we think that it's interesting?

3. Sharing & Flexible Workflow

So MentorNet mashes up with Flickr. The movement of images is facilitated by tagging. Metadata isn't just for finding stuff but making it move, picking it up and dropping it somewhere else. If it's findable, it's mashable. The lowest level of mashability is the level at which we can tag. First page, then image, then pixel.

We don't have the supernatural anymore, just metadata...