People don’t tag multiples: Using tags like folders is like drawing Venn diagrams with no overlapping circles — possible, but so destructive of the value of the system as to make the effort pointless. — Clay Shirky

Analogies

LC subject headings apply as many as are appropriate for later retrieval

Tagging’s an overloaded operator

• later retrieval
• collaboration
• publicizing
• categorization
• hard to get people’s head wrapped around the idea

Technical barriers

• People don’t know about pinging for indexing.
• Using feedburner to automate pinging
• You have to understand RSS, search, pings and the rest of the Web 2.0 technologies
• Hard to get photo sharing users to cognitive shift
• Need a tagging tool for HTML adverse writers. Blummy a good approach.
• IE7 restrictions on bookmarklets.
• Tagging UI’s intimidating Furl’s sucks, but not intimidating
• LJ shift from memories to tags confused and angered users

Functional tagging

• Flickr and Technoratti tags for publicizing
• Tags for retrieval
• Gutenberg Project around tagging
• Tagging gap – economic/cultural
• Portablity of attention data
• emotional tagging
• snark tagging

Power dynamics

• Maintaining privilege — you’re not Glenn Reynolds, Xeni Jardin, or Atrios, how do you get heard.
• iTunes sharing in workplaces — selective sharing to establish idendity, then the boss looked in, and everyone shut up.
• the universe of taggers is full of young white men
• tagusablity for these conversations

ETA Marshall wrote with a corrected attribution to the ‘venn diagram’ quote. Thanks!

1. Simplify your site/process; and
2. Make easier/faster for your users.

Microsoft won the demo of the day with Snax, in which developer Steve Lombard combined the MapPoint web service with a intranet database into a single interactive map pointing to surplus dounuts, pizza and catering across the Redmond campus. You see, Web Services have real applications!

Macromedia demoed something, but we’re NDAed on it. :(

Atomz and CrownPeak demoed their hosted CMS. Atomz’s system did a good job of communicating to users in several roles just what they can do. Both systems deal with link, asset, dependency management.

We had a surpise member in the audience. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen dropped in on the panel. I ran into him this afternoon between panels and introduced myself. He’s an avid reader of SF, and he said he’s been thinking about weblog usablity so check his site. It’ll be interesting to see how he builds on Mark’s work.

Okay, off to the parties!

Mark said that it’s easier to get people to listen to and support accessible design if you don’t tell them to scrap Netscape. And if you want to be agressive, just use @import. Unfortunately, Mark pointed out that IE 5 on Win32 has problems with @import… .

Ward has gone through 20 hours of heck to get a glish-style model working right under IE 5 on Win32.

And a project at work gave up and used tables for positioning after weeks of cross-browser development.

The sooner everyone stops supporting NS 4.x, the sooner people will get off their arses and replace it with a real browser.

And you’ve put in code that’s not valid and will sooner or later break compliant browsers.

If you can’t run Mozilla on your old machine, then install Links or Lynx.

I’m tired of catering to a crappy browser.

Style Question: does one say “x element”, “<x> element”, or “<x /> element”?

Update: A couple of readers responded to this one.