It’s not that bad, but I have to confess. I did a couple of things this week that I regret. I’m trying to get used to the fact that when I write things here, people might read them. I know. That’s the point. But there is only a very thin filter on my idea-generator. So a good idea on Tuesday might be pretty ugly-looking by Thursday.

That’s what happened. That’s all. No big deal. Maybe nobody even looked at it, or thought too much about it if they did see it.

I had this insight into blog genres. I realized that there are basically two different kinds of blogs. There are the informational blogs, and there are the personal expression blogs. There are lots of variations. I figured that I could use this new insight in my tagging scheme to help me sort the weblogs that I have on del.icio.us.

Tagging the links I’ve saved wasn’t really an issue until recently, when I collected over 100 links in a category and tried to find one. It was a huge discovery when I learned that I could click on “add” in the related tags list and search for items that shared BOTH tags. Now, this is a retrieval system that is way better than any folder full of folders. The reason this works for me is that when I put something in a typical folder, there it sits, inside of a single label or buried deep in a labyrinth of folders that I need a shovel and a rake, practically, to find my way through. I lose things easily because my need to find any single thing isn’t always based on a primary category name. Most things fit into more than one category, and organizing material in static folders is always an exercise in choosing the most general label for an item. With del.icio.us we can use as many tags for a single item as we like. This is exactly the reverse of conventional filing systems. In a conventional filing system, if you want to use multiple labels for something, you have to create duplicate items to put in multiple folders. Searching through multiple tags for a single item makes sorting through the layers far more helpful.

So I am liking del.icio.us a lot now. I can even imagine myself getting a little fired up talking about folksonomy and social tagging with anyone who cares enough to help me better understand what it all means. Not much chance of that for me just now, though. Nobody I know has heard of or would even care about any of this. To me, though, I think we are on the verge of a major shift in how information is going to be structured and retrieved.

See? There I go.

The problem with the post I made about this is that del.icio.us is public. And it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with this blog. In the blog post I announced that (oh so cleverly…) I had chosen the tag name, ‘geek,’ for the informational blogs; and the tag name, ‘freak,’ for the creative expression sites. I was careful to mention that I meant nothing derogatory by either term. I thought it was funny that the words rhymed. I mentioned that we are free to use any name that we choose for a tag, and that feature makes del.icio.us powerfully versatile. What happened is that a couple of days after this stroke of dimness I browsed my weblogs file on del.icio.us and saw the word, ‘freak,’ under the title of some thoughtful person’s creative effort. I guess I’m just too polite to be that off the wall and not care what anyone thinks. I wondered what the person who wrote the blog would think if they happened to look though my links. See, it’s no big deal. It’s just taking time for me to get used to the social part of social software.

It’s true that words carry the meanings that we choose for them. But context is everything. And the context in a list of labels is pretty thin. How would anyone who didn’t know me be able to recognize that, to me, the word freak is a term of affection? It has negative connotations that are more commonly applied. As I mentioned before, ambiguity is presumed in all expressive acts. Without any broad context to help other people understand my thinking, I couldn’t leave those labels.

So I made the second mistake. I immediately (because I was in a hurry at the time) deleted the blog post and edited the tags. I should have edited the blog post, too. It would have saved me a bunch of time writing this one. I’ll learn. Embarrassment in a powerful teacher.

I also mentioned that WordPress released a new stable version, Strayhorn, that offers some new features. It’s going to enable me to create “static” pages, and to style the blog with templates. So tomorrow we are going to explore a new look.