Jon Udell on del.icio.us

Gary King points out a screencast on the "social bookmarking" service del.icio.us by Jon Udell. Great work, as usual, from Jon; his earlier effort on the "Heavy Metal Umlaut" article at Wikipedia was perhaps even more powerful. Both draw out some of the power of Internet-scale social/community tools.

It's particularly amusing to see myself on the small screen: I'm one of the people who posted an article on domain specific languages. I posted it under dsl, because domainspecificlanguage(s) seemed a bit long. As Jon points out, dsl is a bit ambiguous. I could change it, but then I'd move my posts away from everyone elses on domain specific languages.

The problems with tagging remain clear. Supporting these social processes is vital, but the web will not be "semantic" until we, somehow, get beyond slapping simple sets of text strings against items. Ambiguity of acronyms is only the tiniest part of it. Still, they are indeed a powerful tool.