How cool… Vancouver-based supergenius Alexandra Samuel (I gotta meet this person!) has published a piece intended to render the “tagging phenomenon both accessible and meaningful to a general audience” in one of Canada’s biggest newspapers (free registration may be required).
Patrice Neff is a software developer based in Switzerland who uses del.icio.us to share links with a partner on a shared development project. And Cyprien Lomas, an academic technology expert at the faculty of agriculture at the University of British Columbia, uses del.icio.us tags to reconnect with colleagues in the tech field.
These early experiments reveal the pent-up demand for simple tools to support online collaboration. But they also reveal how tagging unlocks the gateway between information and community. By allowing people to share information effectively, tags create and support a growing number of online communities. And by bringing communities together around common interests, tags add value to the information those communities gather.
Del.icio.us isn
Deeply, deeply cool.