Tuesday, January 04, 2005

adaptive path » metadata for the masses

metadata for the masses is an essay by Peter Merholz about classifying information using tags. I'm a fan of metadata (it's a bit odd to write that...), but the challenge with metadata is to remember to put it in the head of your Web pages. I'm careful about doing it when I set up a site, but then I kind of forget about it. I love how Merholz makes the connection with the way that paths wear and how classification systems emerge. The more tags I see, the more I refine and change my own.
Tagging is something that I fell in love with as it makes a lot more sense to me and it seems to work. I first started using it on Flickr and then I understood how it worked and went back to the source at Del.icio.us (which is really microblogging) and started using it there as well. My latest tag happy experience is with 43things (which maybe is macroblogging) where tags help to classify your goals. The next thing for me to do is to try and use the labels in Gmail to tag my mail.

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