Why Tag?
While surfing I stubled acrossed The Del.icio.us Lesson on Bokardo’s social web design blog. The article is a good read about why people tag. I know I have become fond of tagging as a way to compensate for my memory shortcomings. I found a good description of my use on Eddie Lopez’s A Brighter Outlook article:
… I also can’t keep one single representation/structure in my head. I remember emails by the context of what I’m thinking at the time (“From my boss” “on this subject” “sent yesterday”…etc).
By using a good number of simple tags I can more easily bookmark a piece of information and move on. Before I would spend a lot more time on the organization part because I knew if I didn’t place it in the right folder now, I wouldn’t find it later.
3 Responses to “Why Tag?”
1 Eddie 17 January 2007 @ 10:45 am
For email tagging you should try Opera’s M2 mail client. They have “filters” which is essentially like tagging IMO. In Outlook, check http://www.cnxn.ca/ (they posted a couple times in that “Brighter Outlook” series of posts) -they’ve built a tagging plugin for Outlook.
Of course, gmail is available to, but I don’t ever use them. I think there’s just too much UI getting the way to make it effecient for me. Of course, I’m pretty lazy
2 chris 17 January 2007 @ 4:53 pm
Thanks for the comments Eddie! Unfortunately at work I need to use Outlook, so I’m on the hunt for a tagging add-on for that. At home I like Thunderbird, mainly because I think it has potential. ATM it still needs a little more polishing. The tagging foundation they have laid in TB2 looks promising, but dislike the current method for adhoc tagging. It seems to be more akin to Outlook’s flag feature than tags. I will have to check out Opera’s client.
For Outlook, I started playing around with Taglocity, but I find its interface cumbersome. As with TB, it is hard to apply tags on the fly (I really like del.icio.us’ classic extension for FF2). cnxn’s offering looks good, but they are performing closed beta testing right now. I couldn’t find out if they will offer a free version or not. I am doubly cursed with being lazy and cheap!
3 Eddie 18 January 2007 @ 10:25 am
right right.. I hear that.
Well, I don’t think it would hurt to send Mark (cnxn.com) an email. You can take my place since I haven’t done much testing with it
I like your “notify me of followup comments via email” option.
Nice touch.
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