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Since I’ve dived into del.icio.us in order to preserve and share my sprawling collection of recommended online reading and experiences, I’ve become deeply fascinated by tagging.

In a nutshell, tagging is the practice of people creating their own labels (tags) to classify content or information, and also sharing their tagged collections so that others can benefit from that descriptive effort. You make up your own system as you go along. Tagging is informal, self-organizing, creative, and surprisingly useful. It’s the hallmark of popular sites such as del.icio.us and Flickr. It creates intriguing context. If you haven’t tried it yet, you should.

When I have time, I’ll probably write my own primer, What is Tagging and Why Should You Care? In the meantime, here’s an excellent exploration of the deeper significance of tagging by David Weinberger: The Three Orders. It’s a bit long, but it’s well written.

Here’s an excerpt…

“Traditionally, people have been loath to attach metadata to objects, because it felt like a chore without immediate benefit. At del.icio.us and other sites such as Flickr, a photo-sharing site, there is a strong social benefit to tagging: We get to contribute to, and benefit from, the tagging done by others.

“To lower the hurdle and encourage tagging, both sites allow us to type in any word we want, rather than forcing us to navigate some hierarchical, controlled vocabulary. Of course, that also makes it far harder to find relevant objects: There’s no immediate way to tell whether a photo tagged with apple shows a fruit or a computer. Plus, a search for photos tagged with apple will miss relevant photos tagged as GrannySmith.

“Tags are a break from previous ways of categorizing. Both trees and faceted systems specify the categories, or facets, ahead of time. They both present users with tree-like structures for navigation, letting us climb down branches to get to the leaf we’re looking for. Tagging instead creates piles of leaves in the hope that someone will figure out ways of putting them to use – perhaps by hanging them on trees, but perhaps creating other useful ways of sorting, categorizing and arranging them.”

One of the lessons I take away from Weinberger’s article is that tagging is important because it’s fun! That is, people are taking up tagging while they’ve resisted formal metadata structuring because tagging doesn’t feel like a chore. And the value of tagging multiplies as more people adopt it.

Tagging is not an imposed and artificial system. It doesn’t ask you to parcel your view into someone else’s ill-fitting boxes. Tagging is a creative, exploratory process. It works because it’s fun and playful.

Personally, when I was growing up in NJ, autumn was always my favorite time of year. It’s when I got to spend day after day jumping in giant leaf piles, admiring brilliant and diverse colors, watching the wind paint designs on my street in crispy pixels.

I guess I haven’t changed all that much…

For the record, here’s my del.icio.us page. And here’s the list of tags I’ve been using there so far. The numbers in this list indicate the number of times I’ve used each tag so far. (You can apply as many tags as you like to a particular link):

• 5 academic
• 1 analogy
• 13 arranging-ideas
• 1 bad-example
• 1 beyond-text
• 2 books
• 8 community
• 3 content-biz
• 2 content-management
• 1 content-rights
• 7 context
• 3 conversation
• 5 creativity
• 1 credibility
• 1 DRM
• 3 economic-value
• 1 feeds
• 1 freedom
• 1 games
• 1 good-example
• 2 government
• 5 human-mind
• 1 images
• 2 interdisciplinary
• 2 interesting-people
• 1 KM
• 4 labels
• 4 learning
• 3 libraries
• 1 neologisms
• 1 organizations
• 3 podcasting
• 7 problem-solving
• 2 problems
• 1 professional-networks
• 1 propaganda
• 2 social-networks
• 7 society
• 1 statistics
• 4 sustainability
• 2 taxonomy
• 3 technology
• 1 tipping-point
• 16 tools
• 1 usability
• 3 webfeeds
• 4 weblogs
• 4 wordgeek