Related Miscellany, Why Do You Mock Me So?

As many of you know, the Common Craft site has gone through a major transition. It was migrated from Moveable Type to Drupal and received a nice new design. One of the outcomes of this has been a complete disruption of 3+ years of blog post categorization.

For years I used a tight set of 6 categories, like:

• Weblogs in Business
• RSS and Syndication
• Social Design

These aren't too bad, but still quite broad. Then I had a catch-all category called "Related Miscellany", to which 250+ post were attached.

Tagging Katrina

Last week I participated in a Seattle Blogwalk (which I haven't yet written about- but soon!) one of the questions we asked was who had blogged about Hurricane Katrina. I raised my hand and talked about using my personal blog to let people know that our friend David Stitcher made it out of the city. I wondered at the time if there was any chance that someone who knows Dave, besides a regular reader, would be able to find that post.

Is it a Tag Cloud? Weighted List? Zeitgeist?

We've seen them on Del.icio.us, Technorati, Flickr, 43 Things, Upcoming.org, Amazon and even personal blogs (scroll), but I'm hearing all sorts of different names. You know what I'm talking about- right? The groupings of words with the size of the text indicating the popularity or frequency of the word.

Behold the Power of Tags

You've likely heard of "The Gates", an art installation in Central Park by the Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

The other night, I thought about how I would be taking a bunch of photos if I were there. Then I thought- I bet there are some good ones, let's check Flickr". I searched for the tag "thegates" and found over 1200 photos of the art installation. It took maybe 10 seconds for me to find them. It was overwhelming, but really satisfying too.

Tag Fight!

I've been enjoying the smart discussion about folksonomies and tagging at Many-2-Many. Danah and Clay have differing views on the subject:

Danah: