Tagging and organizing, fun with social bookmarking

“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.”

“This is what we're starting to see with del.icio.us, with Flickr, with systems that are allowing for and aggregating tags. The signal benefit of these systems is that they don't recreate the structured, hierarchical categorization so often forced onto us by our physical systems. Instead, we're dealing with a significant break -- by letting users tag URLs and then aggregating those tags, we're going to be able to build alternate organizational systems, systems that, like the Web itself, do a better job of letting individuals create value for one another, often without realizing it.”

These are quotes from Clay Shirkey, given in a series of speeches titled “"Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification." and published on his blog here.

I have been reading more of Clay Shirkey this week after hearing him interviewed this week on Learncentral. Shirkey, a professor in NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, is famous for his most recent book "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations". His insights on social media and research about how our networks shape culture and vice-versa, is directly related to our look at social bookmarking.
Shirkey has fascinated me with this idea of organization of information without formal structure. Without this ability, imagine how complex our catergorization of the web would become. Delicious of course, allows the user to easily tag, organize and reorganize pages. Tags allow me to label sites, and later find them easily. In addition, tags group sites in to categories, and enable the entire Delicious community to create user aggregated categories. The social aspect of the process, in some ways the crowdsourcing of the categorization of the web, is a great side effect of a service I can really use easily. This whole process allows for following other users, and the ability to monitor trends, which is probably more important to other types of users. It also allows for updates to twitter, FaceBook, or other social media sites if I feel compelled to share, very useful for breaking news and information.

Digg and Stumble Upon work using a different principal, essentially a binary choice of like or dislike of a site. Again, this is a user driven process, and as users submit sites, other users can review, or just digg a site. As a user, you can choose categories, and digg and SU will organize sites and stories for you. The process is based on your inputs, and what other users push collectively. As a user, I find this less helpful, as it does not provide long term organization.

Overall, Delicious has been a great revelation for me, tagging sites makes things so much simpler over time. I look forward to participating in the organic organization of information through tagging.