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Neville Hobson (who appears to have had a change of address) pointed me towards a company that seemed to believe that enterprise tagging was somehow different from tagging. You can find the full text of his post here.

That started me thinking. Which is probably a bad thing, as most people who know me will aver. But so be it.

I like tags because they’re simple. Because they don’t have to be predefined pieces of some gigantic reference data model for the universe. Or even the enterprise. Reference models are to information what Gantt charts are to projects; ways to make the intermediate product (the database or the plan) more important than the goal. Okay, rant over.

I like tags because they allow one person to say tomahto and another to say tomayto and still figure out they mean the same thing. There is value in letting people describe things exactly as they see them, because that’s probably how they would intuitively look for them.

And if we land up with lots of synonyms, even misspellings, so be it. Use heuristics and collaborative filtering techniques to weed out or let atrophy those things that need to.

I can see “free, unfettered” tags helping with:

• crossing language and geography barriers, translating between cultures
• cross-referencing between systems, translating between data formats
• bridging individual perceptions, translating between perspectives

My gut feel is that we should avoid being prescriptive about these things. Otherwise we will land up with modern versions of the e-mail folder systems I love to hate.

Which brings me to what started me thinking about this in the first place. What is the difference between tagging and enterprise tagging, and why would I need specialist software to help me do it? I can understand privacy and data protection and secrecy and all of that ilk, and if that’s the reason and all we are doing is a behind-the-firewall implementation of the same thing, then I need to understand why I need something separate for it. I’d be interested in other opinions.

More later.

 

 

 

Before ConfusedofCalcutta, this blog was meant to be called NotWavingButDrowning. Why? Two reasons. One, because I really like Stevie Smith’s poem, there’s something about it. And two, I thought it was a strong metaphor for what we face with information.

So I went ahead and bought the domain name. But could I figure out for sure which particular set of permissions I needed to use a domain name that quoted four words in sequence from a poem written probably sixty years ago by someone who died thirty-five years ago? So it lies unused. One day….

Martin Geddes commented on something I’d said earlier, and is someone I “know” through the web and (I shudder to admit it) e-mail, trying to make sense of bad law around that marshy and smelly mess where telco meets internet meets regulator meets cableco. He keeps an interesting multilogue going here.

[Martin, I agree with you. But people really get wound up when I point out the zillion reasons why e-mail is bad. It’s a long hard fight.]

Back to my NotWaving point. I’m used to believing that man spends maybe 3.5 hours a day “consuming information” and that this figure has stayed pretty constant over the last forty years. Say since Moore. During that time, but particularly after the Web, the amount of information that can be consumed has grown by multiple orders of magnitude. There’s probably a Someone’s Law out there telling me that rate of growth.

Something’s gotta give, and each of us needs ways of attracting information, filtering it, retaining what we choose to, enriching it, passing it on. We need better search and syndication and collaboration and communication and visualisation and and and.

None of this is new to anyone out there, I’m sure. What was new to me was how complicated all this was. The internet and telco and ICANN and net neutrality and governance stuff. The IPR and Digital Rights and Mickey Mouse Acts and “just what is patentable” stuff. The incumbent vendors and their lock-ins and proprietary formats and permissioning and authentication issues. How easy it was to build accidental walled gardens inside organisations, to augment the ones we already have.

And the ones we have are called e-mail and proprietary content management and. I shall stop there.

One of my favourite poems is Yeats’ “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”.

Extremely powerful. When I was 15, and I read it for the first time, what really struck me was that the airman flew because he loved flying. Not because of glory or honour or duty or war or pestilence or whatever. He loved flying.

I love working with information. And in a digital world, with costs of reproduction and transmission tending towards zero, we can really make a difference to our world today and tomorrow, particularly in education. Which is why I’m excited about reading Judy Breck’s book; I’ve been trudging around her site and like a lot of what I see. Take a look.

Thanks for the heads-up, Judy. [Another serendipitous meeting through blogs].