Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

This actually makes sense to me. We all want to squirt things on each other so we can recognize folks and recall the experiences we shared. Squirting on each other in public is frowned upon, hence we squirt on ourselves with products like you describe.

I squirt on virtual things (URLs), and I call this 'making them delicious'. When there's people around me and they say "here's a neat page" I reply "make it delicious". Leave a little secretion from yourself and I'll sniff it out later.

Quote from Salon article on tagging:

"It's a very simple concept, and 43 Things is a very simple site, but tagging as it is used here and at some of the Web's most interesting and lively new sites is launching a revolution of self-organization on the Internet. You could call it the latest twist in the ongoing evolution of social networking software(1). Except there's a difference: On social networking sites like Orkut or Friendster, people join, and then declare their alliances to each other explicitly. *On sites that employ tagging, the networks emerge, implicitly, out of the shared interests of users. Order isn't proclaimed, it just happens.*[my emphasis]"

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2005/02/08/tagging/

(1) I think this understates the case: this is like calling AOL's switch from per-hour to unlimited monthly billing a 'twist'. imho, it's a paradigm shift, away from conversation, towards stigmergy.

It might be interesting to equate conversation in the stigmergic world to marketing in the current (conversational) world. Per the clue train, markets become conversations, but in a stigmergic world, all conversations are marketing, and they all say "Play tag with me".

Hmmm, perhaps a future soft drink will feature taggants that encode your DNA enabling you to piss on real world objects and thus tag them. Little 'I was here' signs. I understand Japanese culture allows men to piss in public.

So, it's 2008 and a couple is walking in the city, seeking something to eat, and one says "Wow, the stench of urine around the entranceway is really powerful! It must be a great restaurant!"

Ok, I'll stop here.

Oh how silly, the soft drink would encode your URL, not your DNA.

Thanks.

Tag: You're it.