** My Intellectual Flakes ** » tagging http://liping.edublogs.org On technology, education and media Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:15:40 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.2 en hourly 1 Tagging http://liping.edublogs.org/2007/09/03/tagging/ http://liping.edublogs.org/2007/09/03/tagging/#comments Mon, 03 Sep 2007 05:59:41 +0000 liping http://liping.edublogs.org/2007/09/03/tagging/ The discrepancy between the personal and public value of tagging has been a question sticking in my mind for a while. The book – “Everything is miscellaneous” by David Weinberger has some pretty good discussion on this.

Tagging grew out of a very personal need. “Tags let you remember things your way. “(p. 92. Then what is meaningful for one might not be meaningful for others. In addition,

As we pull the leaves from the trees and make a pile of the miscellaneous, we free the leaves from their implicit context. Compared to trees, piles of leaves are denuded of meaning. (p. 165)

The resolution of this dialectic between tagging for private use and for public good may come from the increasing power of computers to reconstruct the implicit on the basis of the explicit. (p. 166)

So tags’ social value may become more meaningful and clearer when their numbers increase.

]]> http://liping.edublogs.org/2007/09/03/tagging/feed/ 0