Tagging Play

"A December 2006 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 28% of internet users -- and 7% on any typical day -- have tagged or categorized online content such as photos, news stories or blog posts.

These are people who responded "yes" to the following question: "Please tell me if you ever use the internet to categorize or tag online content like a photo, news story, or a blog post." The survey wording was designed to capture the growing use of tagging on sites such as http://del.icio.us/ (a site for sharing browser bookmarks), http://www.flickr.com/ (a photo sharing site), http://youtube.com/ (a video sharing site) and http://technorati.com/ (the blog search engine)....

In a forthcoming book Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, David Weinberger, describes how people are putting ideas, information and knowledge together now that the digital age has encouraged alternatives to organizing information like the Dewey Decimal system. An online interview with Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and a prominent blogger, is featured at the end of this article. " [Pew Research]

Nice charts for presentations, and the subtitle on the report is "Forget Dewey and His Decimals, Internet Users Are Revolutionizing the Way We Classify Information - and Make Sense of It." Yes, imagine if librarians had tried to teach tagging as contributing metadata (it didn't even work for us). Make it fun, make it easy, make it useful to the individual and look what happens. Lessons for information literacy instruction? Think gaming, experiential learning, and immersive learning....