Ed Batista

Beth Kanter has a great post on Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us, who was recently interviewed by David Weinberger at the Berkman Center:

Weinberger started the next question off with
“You’re the
poster child for Web 2.0 and folksonomy.”  Schachter jumped in with, “I
don’t use the word ‘folksonomy. Tagging in delicious is about 1/3
classification and 2/3 functionality. Something easy to do that let’s
you recall the item. The goal isn’t to classify, it’s to
remember.”

Weinberger said, “The other aspect of delicious is that I
can participate in a tag stream that is of interest to me. For example, taxonomy. That stream of tags that comes through
everyday is very rich and a valuable resource. One of the reasons that I tag stuff is that I want to contribute to the
knowledge stream.”

Schachter, “Exactly, think of tags as votes. You’re doing it for yourself, but the good of
the group. Delicious is about memory
first, discovery second.

Weinberger noted, “Delicious feels so social to us, we want
to know who else has tagged the information, we want to know who they are.”  Schachter, “I haven’t come out with a pleasing way
to
display the information. When delicious
tells you the number of people who bookmarked, I hate the way it
looks. When I took it out, people complained. I replaced it with a bar
graph. It shows popularity – large number. If just one other person
bookmark, it
shows a link. Popularity or lack of
popularity lets you know something.”

Weinberger, “One of the problems with tagging is the
ambiguity of language that we use for tags. Enterprise can mean one
thing in the business community or it can mean Star Trek. What are you going to do as the system gets
larger?”  Schachter replied, “Clustering
the data. One tag by one person is one tag by a human. From there, you do math to make connections
to what other people are using with the help of statistics. Show your terms in their language.”

Schachter said there are new features coming that are more
social or will be group oriented. The
first one will be the ability to pick out people for my network and the other
will be private groups or private tagging networks.

I’m intrigued by the social tagging features.  The ability to specific individuals whose tags are important to me and to designate them as members of my network (and optimally, to prioritize and/or label them within my network) is highly relevant to my work with AttentionTrust, as well as to other social reference tools like Outfoxed (which was developed by Stan James, who also worked on the AttentionTrust Extension.)