Thing 13: Isn't it de.light.ful!

Tagging is great! It's one of those ideas that I wish I'd known about long ago. Not only does it make sense for personal browsing, but as a teacher, it's a great way to build a set of resources in a community. The students and teacher can collaborate on the development of content without fear of plagarizing or the need to recreate content. The only disadvantage over traditional bookmarking is that it takes a bit more thought and care to make sure that the tags used are appropriate and useful. For your own use, it would be fine to make up your own tags, but to the extent that you want to share with known collaborators, you'll have to have agreement about the choice of tags. In cases where you want to open the tags to unknown collaborators, you'll need to be able to predict which tags will be meaningful and relevant.

By the way, in an earlier life, I was the marketing director for a company and two consortiums that helped large organizations develop publishing content using SGML and XML. ArborText, OASIS and XML.org.

Both SGML and XML relate to 'markup languages' which is just another way of saying 'tags.' It was those tags that made the content useful and meaningful for repurposing. The tags allowed the sharing and redistribution of content between different users and different publishing modes. It was pretty cool and pretty advanced at the time, but it was also limited (because of practicality) to only the largest organizations--because those could afford the investment in infrastructure, training, tools, and coding--but this is the same concept applied to mere mortals. Vox Populi!