(2011-05-18) Udell Tag Sand Buckets Wikiword

Jon Udell thinks of tags as DIY shared buckets for "URL-s as grains of sand". This isn’t even tagging in the conventional sense. Set aside, for now, the clusters that can form around that tag on Del.icio.us, or on Word Press, or on FlickR, or on Twitter, or even at the intersection of all those tag-oriented services. Consider only what can happen when you make up a never-before-seen term, utter it in a document placed on the web, and invite others to utter it in documents that they place on the web. When we enact this scenario we are, in effect, creating an ad hoc web service that we can use to make and share collections of things related to (in this case) a particular dam project in a particular town. Of course tag-oriented services enhance our ability to make and share such collections. But even without them we can still do it. In the realm of virtual things, names are as plentiful as grains of sand. But they aren’t inert. We can wake them up and use them to co-ordinate our activities. WikiWord As Tag Google Whack!