I tend to rely on a more sensitive organ of hearing: a bookmarklet that I call dc, for del.icio.us conversation. I use it all the time. Suppose, for example, I’d found that University of Maryland page through some other means of referral than del.icio.us. I’d have reflexively clicked the dc bookmarklet to produce this report which shows who else has bookmarked that page, and how it has been described. In this case there’s not much to see. The URL was bookmarked once in Feb 07, by elzzup, to the tags data and class, and again in Jul 07, by manyeyes, to the tag publicdata. This view is interesting for a couple of reasons that I don’t think are widely appreciated. First, it shows a progression from general ways of describing the resource to a more particular way. Note, by the way, that the proposed refinement of data to publicdata is not visible when you launch the bookmarking form, which recommends only class and publicdata. Note also that the introduction of publicdata is really a hack. It would arguably be better to rely on the individual tags public and data. But that would make it necessary to query for the conjunction, and that connection is too fragile. So publicdata also suggests something about how to form tags — that is, by making these conjunctions explicit.

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