Searching WITH Delicious
After posting recently about adding the online bookmarking tool Delicious, I was talking with a colleague at Linn Benton Community College about the difficulty of filing papers. We agree that it's so hard to know where to put things that we could find later. Would this be filed with poetry? or with an individual poem? or what about a poetry organization? Or in a file for graduate students? The possibilities are huge. Trapped in indecision, we leave the papers in piles around our office.
Aha - but consider if we had physical filing systems similar to Delicious. Then I could tag a piece of paper with all the options that might occur to me and store it somewhere. When I wanted it again, I could try various tags until I found it.
This would eliminate the frustration over the weekend as I could not find a poem that I am sure I wrote in about 1990. I visualized perfectly the moment when I thought of the poem - the recalcitrance of inanimate objects - but could not find either a printed or electronic copy. What would I have named this poem? I even looked through my old DOS files. No luck. Does the poem only exist in my mind? Scary thought. That's a teflon sieve for sure. (Ref: MBTI "Perceiving", aka the John Kerry's mental map. No wonder I am a Pisces.)
Using a tangible Delicious, I could (maybe) have found it.
Aha - but consider if we had physical filing systems similar to Delicious. Then I could tag a piece of paper with all the options that might occur to me and store it somewhere. When I wanted it again, I could try various tags until I found it.
This would eliminate the frustration over the weekend as I could not find a poem that I am sure I wrote in about 1990. I visualized perfectly the moment when I thought of the poem - the recalcitrance of inanimate objects - but could not find either a printed or electronic copy. What would I have named this poem? I even looked through my old DOS files. No luck. Does the poem only exist in my mind? Scary thought. That's a teflon sieve for sure. (Ref: MBTI "Perceiving", aka the John Kerry's mental map. No wonder I am a Pisces.)
Using a tangible Delicious, I could (maybe) have found it.
posted by Sara Jameson at 8:22 AM
1 Comments:
I think the same thing about grocery stores, because I can never find what I am looking for. If grocery stores had social tagging, it would be so much easier to find, say, coconut milk, or anything. (I've been meaning to write about this for some time now.)
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