Tags vs. Trusted Sources
Will Richardson,
Weblogg-ed,
Aug 02, 2005
Will Richardson contrasts the use of tags to find useful information with the use of trusted sources. "I've never felt like what I've subscribed to tag-wise at Technorati or del.icio.us has been all that helpful," he writes. But on the other hand, he gets a lot of good information from people he reads regularly. I am inclined to agree. And I think there's an important principle at work here on the nature of communication systems. The idea of tags (and search systems, and thir ilk) is to try to create a short-cut directly from the information to the reader. But the way to improving this communication flow isn't to create shortcuts, because they're too unreliable. It is to reduce the friction as the message passes from point to point from source to receiver. And in a frictionless multi-point communications network, your best (and fastest) information will come from proximate nodes - trusted sources.
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