Taxonomies and Tags

Taxonomies and Tags: When it comes to innovation on the Internet, metadata is becoming the new content.

Tags have become the meme of the year, at least so far, writing another chapter in the history of classification systems. Tagging is an old idea, but it seems to be taking off now because some applications provide end-users with immediate benefits. For example, at del.icio.us, users enter bookmarks (URLs) they want to remember, adding a word or two – tags – so they can sort them later. Del.icio.us users can see not only everyone else’s bookmarks, but also all the bookmarks tagged with a particular word. For example, if you care about Emily Dickinson, you can see all the Web pages del.icio.us users have tagged with “Dickinson” or “Emily Dickinson,” a great tool for researchers.

Laurie Anderson @ BAM

We caught Laurie Anderson tonight at BAM. Her show The End of the Moon is based on her two year stint as the first (and apparently last) Artist in Residence at NASA. I liked it, though listening to a monologue for close to two hours can be a bit of a challenge for me (really, honestly I only close my eyes, I was truly awake for the first half hour. Honest.).

Now, thanks to Misha, I am watching Lisa play Katamari Damacy, which I honestly can't describe but this timely writeup at timely writeup at kottke.org does some justice to the game. I mean, basically you roll a ball around the screen trying to make it bigger by picking up items. It's like something I would have played on an Apple // when I was a kid, but with better graphics and an insane Japanese pop music soundtrack. All I can say is this: it's lasting longer in the house than The SIMS did.