All of this is great, but it only addresses web published content. Blogging is one resolution. If all content was in either public or private blogs, the tools out there now would blow a persons hair green.

But 95% of the information I care about is still not web published. I want all the awesome semantic processing to be applied against every piece of digital information that i’ve ever looked at. I use many different systems (laptop, desktop, pda, library terminal, etc) and some of them have spotty internet service. But I should still be able to have all the content archived and processed and made available. And I should be able to mark my information as completely securely private or completely public and a variety of levels between with trivial flagging.

you just pointed people at piggy-bank on your Daily Links. By the same people:

http://simile.mit.edu/hayloft/index.html

A million years ago I worked on the haystack project. It’s a distributed information management system with automatic syntax mining, that is currently focusing on email. The end goal is to obviate the file system.

The semantic web/world is here, and ready to save us time and create connections, but without good integrated, centrally managed solutions, who has time for it?

I feel about del the way u feel about Greasemonkey.

First a word about me: I am not a programmer/engineer, but I love the power and significance of the Internet. My primary viewpoint is the nongeek use of the web and tools built by, for, with and on the net.

I collaborate with Rick at theinternetco.net to create quickcard.biz. And Rick is my UGC (ultimate geek connections) and partner in crime at quickcard.biz. OK on to my main point for the day:

I’m gradually morphing my cognitive skills toward embracing the “tagging” “continuum” and away from the “filing/subfiling/folder” model.

I think I first unconsciously grokked the power of tagging years ago when using hypercard and macintosh computers.

But now I’m consciously using it and embracing it thru the use of gmail and del.

What I’d like to find is some utility that would allow me to tag all the docs that i create in Word, Excel and all my other apps. That is, never put any file that I create into a folder again, just tag it and go to my tag menu when i’m looking for something.

Google desktop search has some of those capacities, but no ongoing creator of tags list (as per gmail and del).

Rick is working on adding something along this lines to quickcard.biz, which shd allow people to access a taglist within their quickcard sites, but I’m looking for something that will allow me to have an automatic tag creator for all the files I make in all the apps. that I use.

phew.

1. For the system to work appropriately, users should be able to search and browse tags easily. del.icio.us solves both these problems, but the user interface is not sufficient to meet the needs of the average user. I have to admit that even with all my magic foo I was still thrown off when I couldn’t find a search field.

2. Tag inversion (concatenating strings to make an obfuscated tag) seems to be the latest trend. Is it for privacy? Is it for selective communication? Or do people really tag a web site like Amazon with greatestWebsiteEverWithASuperDuperStore? Should del.icio.us keep a list of unique tags, or tags that are exclusive to a single user?

3. For new startups, what are the long-term effects of tagging? Can tagging be rolled into every social network, e-commerce site, etc.?

There has been a bit of talk about ‘tag spam’ where people use inappropriate tags to get exposure for their site. While social tags are useful in categorizing links under certain key words, it’s still hard to get a measure of “appropriateness” or “relevancy” for that key word. It does help to see how many other people have bookmarked that link, though. Some sites are trying to combine rankings with tagging to provide more relevancy and solve the spam problem, like squik.com. It will be interesting to see what happens as these sites get more mainstream.