[I wrote this before Joshua’s double talks at Berkman today – I thought both were excellent – and came home to discover I never posted it. So here it is, in non-reverse-chronoogical order.]

In preparation for Joshua Schachter’s appearances at the Berkman Center (Plug: at 6pm, he’s the guest at a “Web of Ideas” discussion to which you’re invited) I checked his own page at del.icio.us. He has his bookmarks grouped into headings that tell you a lot about him. So does his tagcloud. Same for the rest of us. And, I’m guessing, the subheadings do not necessarily match what we would have listed on a profile page under “interests.” For example, Joshua has headings for ephemera, food, and time. As we create tags, discovering the subheadings we need may tell us something we did not know before about our interests, just as my college buddy Hank in his junior year looked over the courses he had taken and said, “Gee, I guess I’m interested in China.”
That del.icio.us tags and subheads are public of course influences which ones we list. For example, I didn’t want to use del.icio.us to track pages I was visiting when researching large screen TVs because, well, I’m not proud that I was researching large screen TVs. The rest of you may not be as small-minded and vain as I am, of course. [Tags: tagging JoshuaSchachter berkman]

Categories: Uncategorized dw