It's just work

Suw Charman types too fast. She's produced what looks like a fascinating record of the Future of Web Apps conference, but I can't see myself ever reading the whole thing. But this jumped out at me (slight edits):

Joshua Schachter - The things we've learned
Tagging is not really about classification or organisation, it's user interface. It's a way to store your working state or context. Useful for recall. OK for discovery because someone might tag similarly to you. Bad for distribution.

Not all metadata is tags. People ask for automatic metadata, but that's not the value - the value is attention, that you saw it and decided that it was important enough to tag. Auto-tagging doesn't help you do what you're trying to do. ... because there's a small transaction cost that adds value. But don't make them do too much work.

the value is attention ... because there's a small transaction cost, that adds value The value of tagging is in the meaning it encodes, and the meaning is created by people doing a bit of work. If you make things easy by automating the process of getting meaning out of data, that creativity is not called upon and what you get doesn't have the same value.

This parallels my thoughts about the impoverishment of technology through the collapse of alternative ways of using it, often in the name of ease of use - not to mention the thoughts I put down on my other blog about how the best communication (and the best narrative) is gappy and open to multiple interpretations. One way of understanding why gappiness and plurivalence might be a positive virtue, finally, is suggested by Anne, who counterposes predictability and foretelling to potentiality and hope.

I think what all these arguments have in common is a sense of meaning as not-yet-(finally)-constructed. In this perspective the point of social software, in particular, is not to connect data but to enable people to talk about data - while preventing that talk from being entirely weightless by imposing a certain level of friction, a certain opportunity cost. (A cost which can always be raised or lowered. Thought experiment: Wikipedia makes it impossible to revert an article to a version less than a week old. What happens?) In the case of tagging systems, there has to be a reason why you would want to tag a resource, and want to tag it in ways that have meaning for you. Meaning is created through conversations that require a bit of effort, within the shared context of an open horizon: it's work, but it's work without a known outcome. A journey of hope, as someone wrote.

(My blogs are crossing over - I hate it when that happens...)