beatnic - just wondering

Chatting to my friend Claire earlier about having cleared my inbox thanks to Mark Hurst’s very handy guide to Managing incoming email.

We talked about how, because of the tools we’ve been given to deal with our information, we’ve been encouraged to organise our information in hierarchical structures.

A few years ago I built a directory structure in Outlook that I thought reflected my working life. First under the headings “Me”, “My work” and “My team”, and then further sub-divided “My work” in to all sorts of folders to do with the various projects I’m overseeing or inolved in as well as the operational elements and so on.

For me this no longer works.

Now I’m so used to tagging in Flickr and labelling in Gmail etc., I want to be able to apply the same approach to my work information.

In today’s Online section in the Guardian there’s a piece by Jim McClellan on the success of Flickr (a photo sharing and organising website). According to co-founder Caterina Fake, in less than a year its membership has already reached 245,000 and grows at a rate of 5-10% a week.

McClellan discusses the possibilities brought about by Flickr and other social software services on the web, many of which use folksonomies - people-generated tags or metadata - including the impact of del.icio.us and technorati amongst others. These sites help us to organise our own experience of the web as well as brining us together with other people around common themes and interests.

What I’ve been wondering is how sustainable these services are once they break in to the mainstream (if they haven’t already done so). I can’t help thinking each will reach a critical mass where there is too much tagged content to cope with to be useful beyond the personal and “closely” social.

In the same way blogs offer a valuable filter on the labyrinthine plethora of information on the internet (and the “blogosphere” itself), services such as del.icio.us and technorati offer a chance to put a filter on the filters.

What happens next? Is someone already inventing the filters’ filters’ filter?