The "3 Tags Rule" in my previous post was mostly inspired by some things Jim Hendler's Reinventing Academic Publishing – Part III and in an article he co-wrote with Jennifer Golbeck, "Metcalfe's Law, Web 2.0, and the Semantic Web. Both are insightful reads for anyone in academia and/or who blogs.

In the former, I was struck by the phrase "the tag works because of the context." The idea is that tags work well when they exist within social structures that give the tag meaning. So, for example, the tag "cogdog" will likely mean little to people who haven't had the pleasure of meeting Alan Levine or reading his blog. The latter goes further with the idea, nicely describing that the success of "Web 2.0" applications has more to do with social structures than the particular technologies used. The upshot, to my mind, is that while the content we produce in del.icio.us or in blogs is technically and technologically more "open," to a large degree it remains socially closed -- at least as far as tagging is concerned. That is -- contra the scene in Wesch's excellent video, "The Web Is Us/Using Us" in which the answer to the question "Who will organize all this data?" is answered by the cursor moving to the del.icio.us 'tag' button in Firefox -- the tags don't really do much to help 'outsiders' find and understand our content. Tags don't organize content on the web for anyone other than ourselves and the people who are 'in on' our tags.

And so the 3 tag rule is an effort to make my tags more generally useful as a knowledge organizing system. Hopefully, in the future it will also help software to figure out what my tags do and do not mean. For example, two tags I often use in del.icio.us are "library" and "libraries." When I use "library," I'm tagging a page that includes a useful library of php or javascript code. When I use "libraries," I'm thinking of the institutions that hold books and stuff. Multiple tags will give the reasoner a much better chance of getting it right. For that matter, it will help me deal with the ambiguity I'm creating for myself.