Tags gone wild.

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Tags gone wild.

Ok, between moving to Flickr, reading about Technorati using tags now, and being bombarded by articles involving tagging, I can’t seem to get my mind too far away from the implications of tags and social software. The Shifted Librarian posted up an article recently about a presentation she is giving at the MLS February Tech Summit on the topic of social bookmarking sites. Her spin is always about libraries, but you could usually apply it just as easily to education.
She writes:

Why can’t our catalogs let users find items of interest and then store them for later retrieval using their own tags. Take a look at this Flickr page for architecture. Notice the “related” and “see also” links? The same thing happens on the del.icio.us page for architecture. Imagine the display of this type of folksonomy integrated into a library’s catalog, so that users could find titles and subjects for “architecture,” but they could also browse by tags (such as “buildings”
or “urban”), which they could then bookmark themselves and specify as “public” or “private” (like Furl’s “private archive” feature). Aggregate the public tags and let users access their private ones.

Step back and savor that one.

Now we’re getting somewhere. It won’t be easy, but it’s the world we’ve moving to. We tag photos, we tag bookmarks, we tag blog posts, pretty soon we’ll be tagging files (in the upcoming Mac OSX Tiger, you can tag files and create smart folders that will only show files with specific tags). So tag everything! Tag your recipes so you can pull up your Grandma’s Macaroni & Cheese recipe by pasta, home cooking and Grandma. Tag radio broadcasts so I can hop into the car, type in technology and find out instantly if there’s any tech discussions on the Satellite radio at that moment. Tag everything, so when I do a search for my father, Jeff Dembo, I get results including his photo, his contact information, our last 10 emails back and forth, the letter I composed to him in word, and so on. Bring it all together for me and wrap it with a bow.

Alright, I realize that I’ve gone off the deep end here, but it’s all converging. Then when you throw in the social aspect of it, you’ve really got something going. Shall we imagine the library of the future together a bit? Let’s say I do a library search for Positively Fifth Street (a poker book I’m reading). I see that it has the tags poker, cards, murder, Hold ‘em, LasVegas, etc… The card catalogue also links up to a National Library Review Database (trust me, there will be one), so I can see that of the last 300 people to check out that book, 250 loved it and would reccomend it. It also let’s me know that of the 300 people to read it, the majority of them have also read Super System by Doyle Brunson as well as Howard Lehderer’s book, so I might be interested in those as well. I can click on any of the people who have checked it out and check to see what other books they’ve checked out recently to see if there’s any choice books that I didn’t know about. (Note: Of course you have the option of keeping this information private. You had to ask?) If I find someone who has very similar taste to me, I subscribe to their ‘library card’, so whenever they check out a book, it lets me know what they’re reading. May help me find other good books to read, and maybe I want to read the same book at the same time and create a little book group with that person. Does the fact that I’ve never met him before really mean anything at all? No, not really. We have the same taste in books, after a quick search on del.icio.us I find we bookmark similar sites. We have stuff in common, so we should be in touch with each other. Does it matter that he lives in Alaska? Not really. After all, geographic locations are becoming less and less important. Does it matter that he’s 89 and I’m just over 30? Nah. What does age have to do with communication?

What a wonderful time to be alive. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s the world that our children are growing up in. Is your school prepared for these students?