Freedom to tag
Steven Cohen posts critically about authors tagging their own work.
I’ve noticed that quite a few bloggers have been tagging their own blog posts on del.icio.us. My belly barometer goes off when I see this. It just doesn’t seem right to me. I find it counter-intuitive to the collective knowledge base. It also seems a bit egotistical. Thoughts?
So now authors tagging their own posts in some fad internet site is considered unethical? As long as it’s not spam, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it and it is far from ‘unethical.’ Who is Steven (or anyone) to say who gets to post links to what? Advocating restrictions on anything beyond obvious spam is an indication of being unclear on the concept.
With regard to spam, as Cory Doctorow has pointed out, if you have a digital ecosystem, you have to deal with parasites. I get spam in my email just like everyone else, but now that we have spam filters it’s not a big deal. The snail mail spam I get at work from the university itself is far more of a chore to deal with than email spam. And in search, Google has ways of dealing with inidividuals who exploit the search engine to an inordinate degree. These are the appropriate ways of dealing with it. Social software clearly should just recongnize that there need to be mechanisms for managing spam in a way that still gives users control.
But in the case of content creators who aren’t obviously spamming, there is absolutely nothing at all unethical about adding to the collective knowledge base in any way they want. Part of the point of a collaborative effort is that you get contributions in a variety of forms and they all combine to create an organic representation of the larger body of information. Who cares if it’s ‘egotistical?’ If there was an ego restriction on creation of weblogs, you’d probably lose the bulk of them.
In the end, however, it’s not ‘egotistical’ to add to a collaborative information project, particularly one that is used for “your personal collection of links,” as noted in the first full line of text on the site. I don’t use del.icio.us very much (and have never bothered to post a link to anything I’ve written myself), but I, for one, will continue to post whatever I want regardless of whether it gets approval from the armchair ethics committee.