Tagging
Salon has posted an article on a subject that I was meaning to jot some thoughts on here. It’s about the phenomenon of tagging as seen at del.icio.us and flicker.com.
It’s a very simple concept, and 43 Things is a very simple site, but tagging as it is used here and at some of the Web’s most interesting and lively new sites is launching a revolution of self-organization on the Internet. You could call it the latest twist in the ongoing evolution of social networking software. Except there’s a difference: On social networking sites like Orkut or Friendster, people join, and then declare their alliances to each other explicitly. On sites that employ tagging, the networks emerge, implicitly, out of the shared interests of users. Order isn’t proclaimed, it just happens.
The other interesting thing about these sorts of networking tools is that, like many things on the internet, they veer toward post-scarcity-ish, efficient, gift economies. You get more if you put more in.