How Did I Get Here?
February 24th, 2006, By Duncan Gough
No, not the question I’m dreading my son Ryan asking – as much as I’d love an existential debate before his nursery class, but a continuation of an idea I tried to explain in a previous post. That of the leaky metadata approach that is tagging.
When we bookmark and tag an object on del.icio.us or millionsofgames.com we lose the most important piece of metadata – how did i get here? Since social bookmarking is all about saving stuff to come back to later, this ‘how did i get here’ data is hugely valuable. For example, when you lose your house keys, what do you do to find them? Most people run through the things they did from back when they could remember having the keys. Leading up to a point of ‘how did i get here’, where the ‘here’ is ‘being without keys’.
That’s a bad example though. Today, I robotically went through the process of finding a link to a website of code snippets to help me build a multi-page registration system using Ruby on Rails. I knew that there was a RoR-built website that offered chunks of code sorted by language. For a few weeks it was everywhere, but there wasn’t enough data in the website for me to bookmark it permanently. All I knew was that I found the link on lesscode.org. It wasn’t the first time I’d found that link but it was the one I remembered.
Now, if I’d be able to save the ‘how did i get here’ metadata along with the url in del.icio.us, then I could easily have searched for all the links found via lesscode.org.
Of course, that code doesn’t exist just yet, so I did the labourious thing and scanned every post on lesscode until I found the link I wanted – Code Snippets
One comment
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Tags and Metadata at Suttree, Elixir for Immortal Baboon replied:
[...] Primarily, there’s a FireFox plugin call ‘How’d I Get Here?’ that goes some way to achieveing what I wanted in this post. [...]
March 24th, 2006 at 11:17 am. Permalink.