Tag me
: Much buzz about Technorati’s cool new tags from David Weinberger, Ross Mayfield, Mary Hodder.
So I’ve been thinking: Why stop at tagging text and photos.
It’s time to tag people.
This comes out of David Galbraith’s one-line bio and out of arguments I’ve made over time that the real future of classifieds is a generation beyond Craig and Monster: It’s a distributed world where resumes and jobs (or men seeking women and women seeking men) live anywhere and they are found and matched by some specialized successor to Google that uses tags (e.g., work status, education, location, languages…. or smoker, nonsmoker, single, divorced, great personality). In that world, in essence, people, ads, and content are all tagged.
This also fits into the discussion below about the ethic of exhibitionism — finding a way to exhibit key facts about our perspective so our public can judge what we say in that context.
So I started to wonder how I’d be tagged. Would I tag myself? Would the crowd tag me? Would a machine (based on my content and the links to it)? Would it be some Frankensteiny combination?
Would tags go to war with each other? Would the Democrats for whom I’m not conservative enough slap the Repubicans for whom I’m too liberal or would it all average out to centrist?
Would the tagee have the right to modify tags (like a credit report) or would that be self-promotion?
In the end, it needs to be a way for people to find people as well as content and comment and communities.
So how would I tag myself? Here’s a try: media man… blog boy… tall… fast-talking… parent… Howard Stern… Entertainment Weekly… TV Guide… New York… New Jersey… Iraq… Iran… FCC… centrist… shaky Congregationalist… exploding TV…
I would ask how you’d tag me. But I don’t have the guts. So how would you tag yourself?
: Note also how Micah Sifry is adding tags (instead of categories) to his posts using brother Dave Sifry’s new tagging convention.
I want a plug-in that lets me add tags to posts as easily as I add the less flexible categories. Better yet, I’d love a smart plug-in tied into a network of Technorati/Flickr tags that suggests tags to me.
