TQR- “@toread” and “cool” Are Taggers Adding Context Back into the Miscellany?

In @toread and Cool: Tagging for Time, Task and Emotion, Margaret Kipp looks at the words peo­ple use to tag sites in social tag­ging appli­ca­tions (like del.icio.us) Most tags are, as we expect, tags that name sub­jects. Car, cat, cal­cu­la­tor, and such. Of the non-subject words there are many that seem to fall into two cat­e­gories: time and task relat­ed, and emo­tion­al reac­tions (affec­tive).

Time and tasks tags are things like the “@toread” men­tioned in the title or “thisweek” or “peterson_presentation.” Affective tags are things like “cool”, “fun­ny”, “gross”, and

Noting and clas­si­fy­ing these two types of non-subject tags seems to fit into the space of some­things that I have been pon­der­ing in the last week or so.

At the end of Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger makes the point that, as cool as the great big mis­cel­la­neous pile of stuff is, tear­ing every­thing out of its place and throw­ing it into that pile can strip the implic­it con­text that exist­ed in the objec­t’s envi­ron­ment but was not explic­it­ly encod­ed in the object. Is adding time and task, and affec­tive tags the begin­ning of the user attempt­ing to recre­ate orig­i­nal con­text, or cre­ate new per­son­al con­text, or some of both?