del.icio.us changed the /url pages again today.

parser has been updated and should function normally.

Ian Davis talks about how tagging is too expensive and will not, in the end, be quite the revolution…

I’ve come to the conclusion that this simple technology is hobbled by being expensive. This worries me. I’m not convinced that tagging will persist in the long term and I have a feeling that five years from now we’ll be looking back at the fad that was tagging and shaking our heads over the vast inpenetrable databases of tagged content. Then we’ll get back to Google and to our librarians and get on with finding the things that matter to us.

The advantage classification holds is that you can lookup the classification you need and be confident that you have found all that is available. With tagging there is no way to exhaustively search all the possible tags that people might have used, in all possible languages and spellings.

But, it’s not about exhaustivity.

It’s about the ease of finding enough to satisfy the searcher’s need for information. If the need for information is very deep, then it’s up to the searcher to continue her research. If the need for information is fairly shallow (or rather, anything other than deep), the searcher can feel fairly confident that others have been interested in the topic area before and done enough prior heavy lifting on the classification and categorization of resources to satisfy her search.

‘All that is available’ seems to be a strawman in this discussion. Very very few searches could ever truthfully be exhaustively answered. In fact, it’s the professional researcher’s opinion we usually trust when it comes to whether something is related or not. With raw information, as opposed to physical artifacts, I’d even venture that an objectively exhaustive search result (regardless of how it was organized/returned) is impossible.

I think Clay has made a very strong argument and I think he’s hedged his statements where appropriate. Tagging has shifted the cost of classification and categorization. The tools for elegant retrieval aren’t here yet.

But they’re coming.

That’s what I hear him saying.

I also think, in the long term, professionals will still be professionals. They provide information on the resources available and how best to use them. Before, this consisted of the actual sorting and managing of the hierarchy. In the future, this will be much more based in managing the many voices and scrubbing the messiness that bubbles up from below.

Embrace the messiness.

Date Zooming has been added.

You can now zoom in on a section of a particularly interesting graph. This should alleviate some of the forward-moving pressure whereby older/established sites will eventually become boring and flat.

One nice effect is the ability to go ‘back’ in time to more precisely determine where and when a site has ‘leveled out’ and become ‘mature’. Over time, I would expect some statistics to begin to fall out concerning how many taggers are required before a site’s Tag Cloud matures.

Some of this, of course, is determined by the community doing the tagging. But over time, as more of a cross-section of society is using these tools, the true averages will begin to show themselves.