the blog

"You live and learn. At any rate, you live."

One of my favorite writers was Douglas Adams (who wrote "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and some other very funny science fiction books). A month before he died in 2001, I had the good fortune to hear him speak at a technology conference in San Francisco.

"Life is wasted on the living," Adams had said, and on that day he proceeded to expand our minds with a breezy, sardonic discussion about what he expected from the future. Standing in front of a curtain dotted with reflecting stars, he announced matter-of-factly that "We are participating in a 3.5 billion-year program to turn dumb matter into smart matter." One of the many things he talked about was an enormous data model that could one day contain real-time information about every object in the universe — "a soft earth, alive and developing..."

I thought of that when I heard the news last month that Xerpi's users had already created nearly 7,000 tags just to describe their "Favorites" links. The whole point of tags is to create "meta information" pointing people to appropriate content that's already been discovered. It doesn't do any good to have a web page unless there's an easy way to find it for people who are interested. Ultimately it's the user-created tags that complete the relationship between a web page and its potential readers. They're very simple — but they're also extremely useful.

"We are fed up with 'technology'," Adams had told the audience, "when all we want is 'stuff that works'." He drove his point home by talking about one crucial difference between a cellphone and a chair. "A chair doesn't have a manual," he pointed out, but a cellphone does. ("The manual will tell you how to spend 17 hours programming your phone numbers into it with a match stick.") Adams always showed a great deal of faith in the instincts of humans — and a secret fascination with the progress of technology. "Unlike previous generations, we knew it was going to different," he told the audience. "We just didn't know what it would be..."

Last Tuesday was Douglas Adams' birthday. (He would've been 57.) Seven years down the road, I had to ask myself: what did we realize in this far-away future of 2008? And I realized that we humans are now doing it for ourselves. We're collecting up our own sets of "favorites," and then scattering out a trail of tags — like bread crumbs — so that others can also find their way to them. In some small way, we've already taken that first step into a grand, mysterious future.

"It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes," Adams once joked.

But at least some of them can be solved with tags.