I am so all about Rashmi Sinha's cognitive analysis of tagging — this really captures something I've implicitly felt about the act of tagging, which is that it effectively lowers the cognitive cost of organizing information. Admittedly, for some folks there is a learning curve associated with grokking tagging, which itself can be a prohibitive cognitive cost considering most of our lifelong training in classification and hierarchical taxonomies, as well as hierarchical folder structures on the desktop. This is precisely why I've always felt that tagging is a sort of cognitive liberation from the need to decide which single category in which to place a bit of data. It just doesn't work anymore — ideas, concepts, and objects in the digital world are too intertwingled (which I see as a good thing in and of itself) to place into single categories. Plus, the more tags I add, the more pathways I've created both for myself and others to later stumble upon this bit of information — each classification also doubles as a navigation, a pathway to possible discovery.

I take a specific mental pleasure in tagging items as I add them to del.icio.us, Flickr, My Web 2.0, etc. — and Rashmi defines the underpinnings of that mental pleasure quite well. The process is no longer one of narrowing but of expanding — it's more like brainstorming than like analysis. And brainstorming is just plain more fun. The fun is compounded by another aspect she mentions — the fact that "each tag tells you a little about what you are interested in." This is some bit of satisfying clarification just for myself — but there is also a sense of pleasure in knowing the potential serendipity that imagined others out there with similar interests may stumble upon, enjoy, and benefit from an item that I've tagged. I'm classifying something for myself, and I get the benefit of knowing I've not only made it easier for myself to find again later, but the benefit of knowing I may have helped someone of like mind discover something of interest to them. This is where self-interest meets altruism meets contribution to a larger social picture — I feel I'm contributing, even if in a small way, to a serendipitous, widely distributed collective project of presenting and sharing information in ways that makes sense. There is thus an aesthetic and a social activist flavor added to the pleasure I'm already gaining by tagging an item to make it easier for myself to find later.

Tagging is powerful stuff!