Tasty

I just returned from trolling around on del.icio.us. It is a pretty nifty idea. True, there is the risk of "crazy tags" that don't really don't benefit the concept of metadata, but it washes out in the safety of numbers. It is akin to voting. Sure, some people are going to write in "Donald Duck" for president, but it is negligible in the overall results. So just let them have their fun vandalizing 0.000000000000001% of the world. No one will notice. Have faith that most people competent enough to actually use del.icio.us will employ helpful tags and contribute positively to the folksonomy in progress. It is the same concept of openness that makes wikis click, which I think is a matter that will be addressed later.

While the budding information professional inside me says there must be guidelines, I have to concede that the Internet is too big to be diligently indexed by the chosen few. The masses, over time, can do it for free. Let the professionals turn their attentions toward educating others on the art of evaluating information. Don't expect me to say things like "everything in on the Internet" or "if it is on the Internet it must be true." We can file those statements with "since the Internet is now commonplace we can do away with libraries."

I think I'll be setting up an account with del.icio.us, pretty much for the same reason I choose to blog here and not on Myspace: cleaner presentation of data, increased flexibility in its arrangement, and all-around greater accessibility. When the account is finally born and has something to show, you will hear about it.