How we categorize things on the computer
There are lots of moments when I want to surf the web. I want to read something new, interesting, and I don’t wanna go to Google News all the time. Lately, I’ve been going to my DEL.ICIO.US account, and clicking on other users who have the same saved link as me. (You can see my delicious account in the links area on the right). 
I really like surfing this way. I have found some very interesting websites on all kinds of topics. A while back, I read an article from InfoWorld magazine on social tagging, called Collaborative Knowledge Gardening.
Today, I was reading about Gore Inc. and their work environment / culture (I heard about it in the book The Tipping Point). When I added that page from Gore’s website to my delicious account, I could see that only 2 other people had linked to it. So, I clicked on those 2 people to see what other pages they had tagged. I ended up on someone named Page Sands DEL.ICIO.US page. I found a link to a great article called A Cognitive Analysis of Tagging
The best connection from the article was how it compared tagging with categorizing, like how each of us categorizes our emails so we can find
them when we need them. As everyone knows, having a good email folder structure is a real challenge, no matter how hard you try. Two of my
favorite quotes from the article is: “The brilliance of Gmail was to separate the tagging from the archiving.” The other very good quote is:
“tagging eliminates the decision – (choosing the right category), and takes away the analysis-paralysis stage for most people.”
The other main website people are playing up with respect to social tagging is flickr and it has to do with images…I’ve got a flickr account, and have shared it with people after parties, no social tagging there yet…
Image courtesy of Getty Images
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