Libraries turning into bookstores and Tagging at 'Lavalife'!!

The idea behind social bookmarking or tagging is that the person who will retrieve the information at a later date is the one who decides which tags to use. 'Folksonomy' is the general public or folk choosing their own keywords to tag the items they want to remember or return to at a later date. The same idea is behind wikis previously discussed whereby folks who have no previous experience with web design or html can contribute to a website and feel that their opinion and input are as important as those web designers who have extensive technological knowledge. The idea of wikis, social bookmarking and blog creation is opening up many doors for the 'common man' to contribute in many ways with his ideas, knowledge and creativity.

Tony Hammond talks about 'phonetags' whereby listeners hear a song and use a cell phone to tag it to a website and retrieve it later and see the bookmarked songs. The same system could be used for retrieving information about books, titles or authors that someone was looking at in a bookstore or library which they wanted to remember. The site 'Del.icio.us' as a social bookmarking manager could also be used to remember a list of titles or authors as is shown by two of themore popular tags such as 'toread' and a 'wishlist'.

Adam Mathes in his article entitles 'Folksonomies' makes an interesting point when he talks about people's behaviour being influenced by other users of the same social bookmarking site and developing relationships with groups of users who share tag use. If the retrieval systems incorporate user centered managment tools, these schemes developed by users have the potential to be popular and well used. As a translation if 'Joe Public' tagged the books in a library it would be used and understood and be more accessible by more people. In my opinion it would probably result in a real mess! Is it just a matter of time before tagging extends to the 'real world away from the technological one and libraries consider a complete different organisation of resources.? The Gilbert Library in Arizona is the first library in the USA to reorganise its books based on a book store model. However I am not sure how inter library loans between branches would work if one library developed its own system. But I am sure there will be ways around this.

Joshua Porter talks about not being blinded by the aggregation light and emphasises the fact that people do not tag for the sake of tagging. The articles must have value to the tagger before he or she will tag and and he stresses that software developers must ensure that they produce something that people will value and want to tag. The opportunity to tag will be beneficial to those people who are already engaged in certain activities on the Internet and tagging will be the 'cream on the cake'.
In the many dating sites on the Internet the opportunities are enormous to tag 'people' that look interesting and build a 'possibilities' list for future reference. Such tags as 'musical', 'hockey dad' or 'sports jock' might be seen on a 'del.icio.us/lavalife' site !! The opportunities are endless!!