There has been a post brewing in my brain for quite a while now about tags and tagging and tapping into the social power of folksonomies. Like podcasting, the whole tagging thing is not something I’ve been able to fully embrace, partially because it just leads me to that information overload part of my brain. I’ve tried adding Technorati tags here, but, obviously, it hasn’t caught on. Aside from the occasional conference tag, I’ve never felt like what I’ve subscribed to tag-wise at Technorati or del.icio.us has been all that helpful. It’s either too divergent or too overwhelming to get through. And there’s always been the spam issue, which I’ve started to see more and more. It seems that it’s getting almost impossible to escape.

Where I have had more success, at least in managing the flow, is in subscribing to trusted sources, people like Alan Levine, Jim Wenzloff, or Amy Garhan (to name a few), and even then maybe just specific tags from those folks. Here too, however, I bump up against the time to read and information overload issues. Ten feeds of this type are about my max, and it takes time to select them in the first place. But bottom line is that I get much more relevant stuff by subscribing to the person as opposed to the tag (unless of course it’s the person’s tag…oy.)

Taking this all just a step further, I will say that I’m finding tagging my own bookmarks for my own purposes to be pretty effective as well. I spent much of the last couple of days going through my Bloglines “keep as new” posts (over 100 again) and bookmarking them into my Jots account. There, I’m really starting to see a “willsonomy” develop, one that I find is easier to store and retrieve stuff with. (Of course, I’ve backed all of this up by subscribing to my Jots feed (along with seven other hearty souls) on Bloglines just they’re backed up. Welcome to my life…)

Just from this post you can see the potential for total brain collapse. And that’s even more of a reason we need to think all of this through and provide options for our students and teachers. We are all going to find our own unique solutions. Bottom line for me is balancing my desire for relevant information about the topics I’m interested in with the time I have to put into creating systems to bring that information to me. But the key shift is that at least I can do that…I can tap into the efforts of any number of experts, mentors or kindered souls out there who are searching for the good stuff just like I am.

A new Pew Internet and American Life report says 68% of all teenagers have used the Internet at school. While that’s a 45% growth in the last four years, that still puts my school so far detached from reality that it’s not even funny. It’s 100% here, no doubt. Another reminder of my fortunate circumstances that I know I forget to appreciate more than I should.

Other findings:

In keeping with the “Read/Write Web Software for Educators” meme, seems Todd Slater is developing scuttlEDU.

ScuttlEDU is different in that it is designed to make tagging easier for educators. When you register for the service, you are asked to provide your grade level and subject area. When you add a bookmark, these two pieces of information become tags. You have the option of not using these tags as well.

He’s looking for test drivers, and I just volunteered. Another step toward some more teacher friendly tools for those who aren’t comfortable with the current offerings.

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Dave Sifry over at Technorati is doing some numbers crunching this week, and the latest update notes that 80,000 blogs are being created each day. That’s one a second. Every 5.5 months, the blogosphere doubles, meaning that right now they are tracking somewhere in the neighborhood of 14 million blogs. By 2006, it should be over 20 million. Most interesting to me is that 13% of blogs are updated at least weekly, which means there are somewhere around 1.5 million of us writing publicly on a regular basis. If the trends continue, that will mean 6 million a year from now. Even if that trend slows a bit, in two years, we should be close to 20 million. Cool.

Tomorrow, Dave is posting the number of posts being created each day, and later in the week, he’ll be talking about blog spam, tagging and more. I’m sure there will be much more to note. Bottom line, this “fad” ain’t going away any time soon…
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