There’s a (really short) interview w/ del.icio.us inventor Joshua Schachter here:
The Tag Report IV: A Chat With Joshua:

I wish there were more to this part of the exchange;

Joshua: is taking the process of memory, and building prosthetics.
Joshua: I want to split storing and recalling into two separate actions with the help of the computer, so that when you tag things you store, you can recall them more easily
Joshua: In doing so, I have also made it easier for you to recall things that other people have stored.
Joshua: Tags facilitate and amplify this.
Joshua: Search is more associated with the recall, whereas tagging is more associated with the storage.

I keep writing about stuff like del.icio.us and flickr (and now my new “tag it” applescript for iTunes) in the hopes of generating some decent discussion regarding the benefits of tagging information for storage/retrieval vs. just throwing it somewhere and searching for it later (well, that, and it’s such a good idea that I feel compelled to do some meme-spreading). Most of the current discussion about tagging “stuff” has focussed around folksonomy which is definitely a benefit of tagging stuff, but for someone like me who consistently has *way* too many irons in the fire, retrieval of “stuff” is almost as critical to keeping my act together as knowing what to do next. [note: more on the notion of folksonomies here Also, the Wall Street Journal covered the tagging vs. search in a recent piece: Tagging The Internet. If you follow no other links from this post, read the WSJ piece.]

On the one hand, tagging found stuff is very helpful for later retreival and it increases in usefulness when you get to compare how you tagged something with how others tag that same stuff. However another lesser-discussed feature is how tagging your own stuff can change the way you draw associations between items in your collection of stuff (perhaps one of the reasons this feature of tagging hasn’t been discussed too much it because it is very difficult to define the terms ;-)

It’s easier to see what i’m talking about here when it’s applied to a large music collection. Most of your MP3 collection is probably tagged to one degree or another with the artist, the album and maybe a “rating” and/or a genre. The problem here is that the fixed nature of these tags force you into categorizing your music in an unnatural way that prevents your from drawing intutive connections between tracks. And when you”ve got several thousand tracks in your library you want to be able to draw as many connections as possible. Hence the need for more flexible tagging.

I’ve been casually tagging some of the tracks I’ve been listening to over the past week or so and I can already see that if my entire collection were tagged my mixes or playlists would be way better. Some of the tags I’ve been using are:

• 335 (as in *Gibson 335*)
• running (good to run to)
• kids (music jay likes)
• ballad
• funny
• dobro
• wintersun (a sub-set of ’80s music that reminds me of bright winter days)
• walking
• bagpipes (which also includes guitar solos that *sound* like bagpipes a ‘la Big Country)

So clearly not many of these “tags” are genres or ratings but much more free-form in nature. However, when combined with ratings and genres it now becomes possible for me to create playlists that are much more specific like “jazz ballads that feature a Gibson 335.” Or I can make a car cd out of “reggae and pop tunes that I’ve rated with 3 or more stars and have the kids tag.” This makes for much more bearable road trips ;-)

Some of the tags are obviously more personal than others but it would still be very interesting to see how other people ‘tag” their music collections and see where they intersect. The same holds true for movies. The 1-5 stars rating system of movies (on Netflix) or music (on iTunes) obviously falls short. It would be much better to be able to say things like “5 stars on a rainy afternoon” or “4 stars if you’re watching while doing the laundry” or something like that.

The whole point of thinking critically about the arts is that we’ve got less time on earth than it would take to ingest all of the art that is available so we’ve got to make critical decisions about what we want to give our attention to. I think tagging can improve our brain’s own innate associative skills to allow us to be suprised by the grouping of what we choose to focus our attention on and to make better discoveries about our art and, in turn, ourselves.