I just imagined what my life would be like if I constantly thought as much about content structure offline as I do online. I’d be walking around in my house and on every single object in my house would be a big sticker indicating the properties of that item. So if I had a painting, a big sheet of paper would be stuck over the painting and on it would be the following.
Artist: Yadda Yadda
Date Created: 21 Sept 1993
Materials: Oil Based Paints
Colors Used: Yellow Green
And so on…
Then even more so, between all of the pictures of art in my house I would tie strings connecting each piece of art to each other, so that I would know that they are associated with each other.
Do you see the absurdity of what I’m talking about here? We are so focused on tagging the content that we lose focus of the content itself by almost covering it up when we categorize it. It is like writing a small post but then adding tags to categorize the post and your tag count exceeds the number of words in your post. It’s ludicrous.
When we buy a book in a store that we are going to read later, do you adhere labels to that book such as "book" to know it is a book or "bookshelf" to know to put it on the your bookshelf at home. No, you just do it. The action itself of putting that book on the shelf defines that it is tagged "bookshelf" and grouped with other books there.
Therefore, when we are working with our content online we need ways in which we can just as easily tag our content automatically based upon our actions and where we place this content. In doing so, it will allow us to remove the tagging interface so that only the content remains standing simply and uncluttered like a beautiful piece of art.
