Yet another would be pundit, posting on del.icio.us... prolly not even original-like
There are many arguments against how useful del.icio.us is as a service, and most of them point to problems with how folksonomies work in general. Specifically, detractors have pointed to the fact that because people create their own labels for resources when book-marking URLs, semantic problems will arise if bookmarks are pooled.
Suppose my family uses a pooled book marking service. I label www.newegg.com “Da’Egg”, my father labels it “Video Store”, and my mother labels it “The Enemy”. Now labels for bookmarks are unavoidable. If we tried to remember all of the relevant resources we use daily by URL, I think our collective brains might hemorrhage. However, how useful are each of these widely divergent labels for people who did not create them? I imagine they could be almost useless unless you knew the person who created the bookmarks very well, because these labels are full of semantic information that is only relevant to the creator, or those who can empathize with the creator well enough to get inside his or her head. I could probably figure out what “The enemy” refers to for my mother, but not necessarily for a user named “Joey Joe Joe Junior”.
This means that the primary utilities of del.icio.us are that you can share bookmarks with people whom you know (with varying degrees of success), and that your bookmarks are they are centrally stored on a server, making them available from anywhere. The latter is a interesting, though. A centrally stored repository of the way that people label websites and web pages… aggregated and analyzed properly… how much is that information worth?
Suppose my family uses a pooled book marking service. I label www.newegg.com “Da’Egg”, my father labels it “Video Store”, and my mother labels it “The Enemy”. Now labels for bookmarks are unavoidable. If we tried to remember all of the relevant resources we use daily by URL, I think our collective brains might hemorrhage. However, how useful are each of these widely divergent labels for people who did not create them? I imagine they could be almost useless unless you knew the person who created the bookmarks very well, because these labels are full of semantic information that is only relevant to the creator, or those who can empathize with the creator well enough to get inside his or her head. I could probably figure out what “The enemy” refers to for my mother, but not necessarily for a user named “Joey Joe Joe Junior”.
This means that the primary utilities of del.icio.us are that you can share bookmarks with people whom you know (with varying degrees of success), and that your bookmarks are they are centrally stored on a server, making them available from anywhere. The latter is a interesting, though. A centrally stored repository of the way that people label websites and web pages… aggregated and analyzed properly… how much is that information worth?
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