They are a necessary evil I feel both physically and digitally. Not everything is easily file-able or able to be fit into a easily defined category. Clay Shirky alludes to this when speaking of folksonomies allow for things to be tagged with different meanings and thus make them easy to find. Of course he speaks of the problem with physical items, say a library book, not being able to be shelved on 5 different shelves. So we can add tags to things and that will help us organize and find things in the future, and attach meaning to them. I set about the fearsome task of ‘organizing’ my Google Reader this morning and ran into some problems that I am still trying to figure out and get myself to the right mental model of what I want from the tools and options that Reader gives me.

• You can add multiple tags to any particular RSS item
• You can add an RSS feed to multiple folders
• But, tags and folders are the same

Folders are tags, so they get put in the same pool of tags. What’s good about this? One can put an RSS feed into multiple folders, effectively having it shelved on multiple shelves in your library of feeds. But like in a library you only want to have a certain number of folders, so you try to distill down the list, group similar items and get it to a manageable number. And then there is stuff that doesn’t really fit into any of your broad-as-possible-while-still-being-useful folders. This stuff has sat unfiled, unorganized, adrift until today I was able to ignore the desire to put them into 1 (obviously not happening) or 8 (seemed not so great either) folders so I made a new one which I called Interesting, and this is my junk drawer, and I am very happy with it.

tags:Google Reader junk drawer RSS

Written by admin (contact).

It was written on October 10th, 2008 at 11:44 am
Filed in the Category orphan, personal