User tagging!
User tagging is one of the most interesting internet developments to me AND the one I think librarians should be paying the most attention to. Tagging is natural-language searching is Google is the way people (read: civilians) want to search. Reading what non-information professionals say about information access is incredible… often the opposite of what librarians are saying. Case in point: I caught two posts on one of my fave non-librarian design feeds. The first post: Tag clouds are the new mullets and the follow-up post: Remove Forebrain and Serve: Tag Clouds II. He is less than thrilled with user tagging. Non-librarian, mind you. The first post reads to me as a critiscm of obvious tagging, as in showing the user the words used via the fontsize of the keywords. I have to admit that he might have a point. He does go on to say that it's a good idea, that has turned sour with overuse. A few quotes from the second post have obvious applications in the library sphere: “We who make websites must strike a fine balance between guiding our users and allowing them to lead us. We listen but we also synthesize and invent. We conduct user research but we interpret the results. We ask what users want but we decide what they are really telling us
