One of the most useful things that I ever learnt about filing was to think of it as a retrieval system rather than a storage system: finding rather than filing. In other words, what will most likely help me to find this again when I need it? My big difficulty has always been when, for me at least, the something I'm trying to store for retrieval is related to several categories [always likely with an interdisciplinary mind like mine] and I can't be sure which is likely to be uppermost. Tagging comes to my aid because I can indulge in my favourite pastime of 'both-and' and banish the anxious indecisiveness of 'either/or'. This quote puts it well:
David Weinberger, ... explains that when knowledge was imprisoned on paper, it had to be stored in one place, under one address, usually with the one-dimensional Dewey decimal system. But thanks to the internet and tags, knowledge is now freed from the bonds of paper and can be found from many directions
The article is worth reading and passing on to friends who aren't yet into tagging.
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Tagging - the latest way to search the web: Filed in:
tags,
blogging,
del.icio.us,
taxonomy,
social,
folksonomy
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