Email Tagging
I just listened to Clay Shirky's talk Ontology is Overrated in which he mentions the merit of collective tagging using del.icio.us as an example.
Hearing this, I had the idea that this could be useful for email. No wait, I'm mixing two talks up. Can't remember what the second one was.
Anyway.
Imagine:
Merits:
1. When you send mail to a lot of people (or even a mailing list), you may get that del.icio.us effect Mr. Shirky talked about, where you can say that a particular link (email in our case) is 90% blog, 17% internets, 9% cool and 1% bullshit (that being the percentages of people who applied those tags to the mail).
2. You can sort, classify, search and organize (redundancy redundancy) your mail by tags. I sure have a hell of a time finding years old email from "that dude at the university who always used his gmx address" (which means I can't find him by searching for
Think about it.
Hearing this, I had the idea that this could be useful for email. No wait, I'm mixing two talks up. Can't remember what the second one was.
Anyway.
Imagine:
- An Apple Mail plugin lets you tag your mail.
- Recipient(s) tag(1/s) it also.
- The two plugins communicate and consolidate the tags (never mind how).
Merits:
1. When you send mail to a lot of people (or even a mailing list), you may get that del.icio.us effect Mr. Shirky talked about, where you can say that a particular link (email in our case) is 90% blog, 17% internets, 9% cool and 1% bullshit (that being the percentages of people who applied those tags to the mail).
2. You can sort, classify, search and organize (redundancy redundancy) your mail by tags. I sure have a hell of a time finding years old email from "that dude at the university who always used his gmx address" (which means I can't find him by searching for
in.tum.de)Think about it.
posted by Tobias Klüpfel at 6:45 PM
3 Comments:
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I'd like to see the possibility of adding meta information (e.g. keywords) to every email. Maybe there will be a Thunderbird extension...oneday...in the future...?
It would certainly be interesting to see.
I thought a little more on this, and I think it would need a veery comfortable interface (better than, say, the way flickr tags are handled), and also a way to automate tagging (although what escapes me right now is how)
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