Automatic tagging?
If tagging is supposed to help us, both individually - as a way of reflecting
upon what we're saving, and collectively - by giving us a glimpse into what others
find valuable, how do we explain the lazy
sheep bookmarklet? What does it do? Well, the explanation is quite short:
Lazy Sheep is a del.icio.us bookmarklet that auto-tags and auto-describes your bookmarks.
In other words, why waste time thinking about how you want to categorize that
page. Just do it.
I first learned about this bookmarklet via Rashmi
Sinha, who seems to most definitely be one of the main thinkers on the topic
of tagging (and why, might I ask, did I "discover" her via a Google
search, and not via somebody's tag on del.icio.us?).
Sinha has written numerous
times on tagging, and seems always to not only be asking good questions, but
to be pointing in the right direction for answers as well. Sinha
is disturbed by the lazy sheep bookmarklet, essentially because it
overrides the essential cognitive processes that make tagging meaningful in the
first place:
Del.icio.us captures a process that happens at the
cognitive level anyway. And in the process of capturing the associations, it
reinforces them. When I note that this article is about "tagging" and "cognition",
I am explicitly informing myself that I am currently interested in "tagging"
and "cognition". So the process helps me keeps my bookmarks, and tells me a
little about myself everytime.
At the social level, the moment I post to del.icio.us, I can see if there are
others who are interested in the same article. If so, did they use the same
tags? I can see how others think similarly and differently, and also see the
long tail of idiosyncratic tags.
The whole thing works because I make an independent effort to tag the article,
and find out posthoc how others tagged it. That is an essential ingredient of
del.icio.us.
As I've written before, "I wish I'd written that". The least I could
do is tag it.
Go to: Whether we're for or against, or
Go to: But you can, you can!