A thought about tagging, one that's been niggling for a while: when I first encountered de.licio.us, I happily forged tags to suit myself, in my own idiosyncratic style (bloggery, culturewars, cyberia, geekery, memery, metastuff, musics, knowledge_web, to name a few tags that have caught a lot of items), thus insuring that I wouldn't be contributing to tag clouds, since I was using terminology that nobody else was using. I set myself up to be an isolate, with the implicit notion that it's desirable to do things in unique/idiosyncratic ways. That's a stance I've occupied in many other realms: not many others play mandocello, few kick against the pricks of conventional "assessment", being an anthropologist allows one to do whatever and it counts... call it all 'personal style'. Anyhow, in the context of social software, my strategies are pretty anti-social. Goes back to Third Grade: ("content to play with like-minded others..."). Thus, my blogging activities, like my logfile activities, have very small audiences, often just the one...
I ought to be thinking and writing more systematically in these realms, and ought to be joining conversations that I lurk on the fringes of. That's never been comfortable for me, as a matter of style. Even this commentary is intended for... well, whom? Principally myself, though I'm happy enough for anybody to read it, if they happen upon it via some serendipitous clickage of links. I wonder if there aren't legions of people out there who do the same thing?
But where does this page belong? It's part of the slipstream of reading and thinking, and it's developing in the context of some processes of redefining what I do or might do... so it should be linked to Endgame, I guess.
Here's an example of the utility of the social: technorati 'reboot7' actually gathers together postings that collectively inform one another... instant Community. I see that technorati 'memery' does link to one of my uses, likewise technorati 'metastuff', so the stigmergic trails are there...
And here's Spike Hall saying "No common tag rules means problems, even dysfunctionality". A posting well worth revisiting, and yet another example of the nowness of blogspace. Here's just what I was thinking about, reflected in what somebody I sort of know was saying just yesterday, brought to me via Edu_RSS...