Tagging

I read the essay by Clay Shirky with fascination. The concept of classification is one I'm very soon going to be tackling in my librarianship course, so this is something I shall be investigating much more thoroughly over the coming weeks (okay, months - I'm quite slow!).

Before I start playing with tagging, my initial thoughts are thus: I am not a fan. Yes, I love Google over Yahoo for the reason that I don't have to know what directory something is in - I type, I find (or refine, or give up...). However, people tag according to how they perceive, and I generally find I don't perceive the world in quite the same way. In fact, I get quite uppity about tags I think are inappropriate for the object being tagged, and feel like someone is enforcing their world view on me!

I have added tags to all my cam23 blog posts. I'm not an imaginative person, so they are almost all tagged with three things. Anything to do with cam23 things (ie pretty much all of it) is tagged 23 things; each thing is tagged by its number (thing 1, thing 2 etc) and then if I've used a particular program or widget, I've tagged by its name (so Twitter, Doodle etc). Beyond that, I can't really think how I would need to tag anything. Did I mention I was unimaginative? I did like the idea of Yay/Nay/Meh, but I find I need so many qualifiers: "this one is mostly yay but there's this bit which is nay so I'll tag it as both" is too spammy to be worth me using it...