Salon-Tagging Tagging, the Web's newest game... Welcome to the key-worded universe.
"This isn't a big technical innovation," says Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext. "It's more the simplest thing that could possibly work, that shouldn't work, but happens to." right, good.

What could be more culturally and socially determined than how we choose to label the things we're thinking about? really? oh for idiosyn idiom personal specific.
You could use obscure words to tag all your information and end up with a secret language known only to you. but then your data doesn't get to play with everyone else's. "The fact that you know that there is a social aspect to this actually encourages you to pick tags that are relevant," says Technorati's Dave Sifry.

-article starts out re goals of a seattle guy on (and who started) 43 things interesting bc I know seattle... (there's a "hideout" there too, huh. and he took the water taxi to west seattle. -oh and, not local but, rg: turned living rm into amateur studio for using Garageband) ... so this local interest, is that the idea of thingster? previously, and on the whole, though I think I find 43things depressing.
huh: Salon- AZ's 43 Secrets. Remember that famous New Yorker cartoon "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog"? On the Internet, nobody knows you're Amazon.com, if you hide behind the friendly face of an independent start-up. Shortly after Salon's cover story on tagging was published on Feb. 7, we received an e-mail from a reader urging us to look into the relationship between a site featured in the story, 43 Things, and Amazon.com. The Web site, which is produced by a start-up that calls itself the Robot Co-op, is a place where visitors can confide their hopes, dreams and goals and connect to other people with the same aspirations. To all outward appearances it looks as if it is yet another grass-roots Web start-up. But it's actually funded primarily by Amazon, although neither Amazon nor the Robot Co-op wanted users of the site to know that. Several of the founding members of the Robot Co-op, including Benson, used to work at Amazon in the company's personalization group. ah-personalization, is that where this got going? mvmt away from providing content (by 'experts', ie bookreviewers) and toward automatic configuration reflecting user's preferences ('see the page you made'.)

Tags are not selected from any pre-codified hierarchy set by the site designers. They simply arise from the grass roots -- you and others like you. 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.

salon, salon, salon: The Friendster of photo sites 12/04 .Flickr.
You are who you know 6/04 You are who you know: Part 2 'social networking software' link from tagging article