This week’s topic in Social Technologies 2 is Social Bookmarking - something that has fairly recently appeared on my radar through a combination of playing with feedbooks, tweaking category names in my blog, and then installing a keywords plugin on my shiny new WordPress install.

Over the past 2 - 3 years in my blog, the categories that get the most traffic (from me) and entries added has varied over time. When I transferred to WP, it was intriguing to see some category pages that had not had a new entry for over 12 months. Others reflected more recent interests, yet one thing that has always felt a bit restrictive about the categories was their fairly clear delineation. Sometimes I would add a secondary category to a post but that was rare.

I’ve played briefly with del.icio.us and like it as an idea but have yet to work it into my workflow. If I am blogging about it, then it is saved to my blog, so why add it as a bookmark on another site? Maybe there is space for using a bookmarking tool for capturing locations on the web, and my blog for other more thoughtful stuff?

http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html
Clay Shirky provides the first reading - He argues that categorisation can be difficult

“Even in a nearly perfect categorization scheme, there are these kinds of context errors, where people are placing something that is merely true at room temperature, and is absolutely unrelated to essence, right in the center of the categorization.” </p>

So in dealing with the field of education, the ‘tags’ are way too fluid to apply a really defined, predefined schema. Does the schema need to evolve and change as the knowledge or what is encompassed within a field fluxes, flows and falls away? As Shirky says,  Yahoo - which uses a hierarchical model for organising it’s categories

“put an upper limit on the number of symbolic links that could go into their view of the world. They missed the end of this progression, which is that, if you’ve got enough links, you don’t need the hierarchy anymore. There is no shelf. There is no file system. The links alone are enough.” </p>

In contrast,

“Google can decide what goes with what after hearing from the user, rather than trying to predict in advance what it is you need to know.” </p>

Maybe I can achieve the best of both worlds with a combination of categories and tags? Categories for when I want to browse a topic “Let’s see what I’ve gathered about that”,  and then tags to aid and abet my searches “I know I tagged that, now what words would describe it?” Things like names of people giving presentations are ideal candidates for a tag, whereas they wouldn’t earn their whole own category. So does that mean I should have a catalogue list as well as a tag cloud on my blog pages??????
And again from Shirky

“Tags have the additional effect of grouping related URLs together. There is no fixed set of categories or officially approved choices. You can use words, acronyms, numbers, whatever makes sense to you, without regard for anyone else’s needs, interests, or requirements.”

“The addition of a few simple labels hardly seems so momentous, but the surprise here, as so often with the Web, is the surprise of simplicity. Tags are important mainly for what they leave out. By forgoing formal classification, tags enable a huge amount of user-produced organizational value, at vanishingly small cost.”

More to come…..

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