I just heard a suggestion on the Today programme, that there’s a recommendation that the elderly be tagged. My initial reaction was one of confusion – how would we do it? By tying labels to them with words like “old”, and “crumbly” scribbled on them?
In a meeting this Monday I raised the concern that maybe there was too much reliance on tags in web applications. Was this just lazy thinking, I asked? Had it just become an empty signifier of Web 2weeness, like fat fonts, fades, diagonals, shininess and “beta”?
No, pointed out LShift’s Mike Brigden – properly-implemented, tags allow people to create new, unplanned services (for example, meta-searches across Flickr, del.icio.us, and Last.fm). They offer a base-level API, as well as a new way to navigate information.
Does this make sense? Are they more than a cliché? I’d like to think so.
Technorati Tags: folksonomy, web2.0, tagging
As long as the coffin dodgers get to scribble random words on *each other*, it’ll work. An ‘old folksonomy’, if you will.
Sorry. I’ll go now.
Well, over at Corporate Casual, tags aren’t so much cliches as they are punchlines.