week 8: social networking: collaborative tagging

Golder and Huberman's article on collaborative tagging seems to cover both the good and the bad but concludes with a positive comment supporting this concept. Initially, I wondered how organizing information could be a collaborative effort without some sort of plan on how to organize things...wouldn't it be a bit chaotic with so many different people adding their own tags? By the end of the article, a few points remained in the forefront of my mind:
1.) even information tagged for personal use can benefit other users. For example, if many
users find something funny, there is a reasonable likelihood someone else would also find it to be so, and may want to explore it.
2.)Tagging is fundamentally about sensemaking.

I now think of tagging as the new version of "highlighting and making notes on the side". Before the internet, the highlighter (which only came in yellow in the 80's) was the best way to draw attention to key points in a written article. Adding a few points (in pencil) on the same written material came next. Content was being organized and labeled..."sensemaking" was taking place. I remember finding a textbook with someone else's notes in it ... this was usually considered a good thing. Often, I would add my own notes to the ones already there. Is this "collaborative tagging"? I would say it is to a degree. This version of "tagging" still exists in books today as I see it in my youngest son's textbooks.