A journey of a Freesoul in the Social Age

Note: This is a test post. I am testing BagTheWeb.com’s POSTS feature. Check here to view this post’s comparison version on BagTheWeb.com

Organizing information is an important and common task in the lives of human beings and in the life of a society because we organize to understand, to explain, and to control with order. People have used three approaches for organizing information on the Web: classification systems, chronological order, and folksonomy (a.k.a. tagging).

People use classification systems in both the physical and virtual worlds. For example, classification is the main method to organize books in libraries or categorize living things in biology. The hierarchical tree structure of a classification system is also applied in designing the information architecture of individual websites.

Chronological order is a classical approach for organizing information in human society. This approach is also a common method used in the design of Web applications. The email system was created using chronological order. In the late 1990s the blog system was designed with reverse chronological order. As social network sites became popular, chronological order has been applied to feed readers, micro-blogging sites, lifestream sites, and other web applications.

According to the “Folksonomy” entry on Wikipedia, “Folksonomies became popular on the Web around 2004 as part of social software, such as social bookmarking and photograph annotation. Tagging, which is characteristic of Web 2.0 service, allows users to collectively classify and find information. Some websites include tag cloud as a way to visualize tags in a folksonomy.”

Basically, BagTheWeb not only creates a platform to enable people to organize information easily but also organizes information using an innovative approach: relevancy linking. The new approach surpasses chronological order, classification, and folksonomy.

Relevancy linking is our approach to developing the bagging platform. A bag is a collection of grouped Web links and bag links. Our bagging system involves two-level architecture. On the first level, any webpage can be linked into a bag and connected to other Web links based on the theme of the bag. On the second level, the group of links in a bag can be connected to other groups of links in other bags as bags are linked.

By arranging the relationships between Web links and bags, people can organize online information in a new way, different from traditional approaches.

Our bagging system is not designed by using the chronological approach. Instead we focus on the relationship between items because we learn by connecting.

The bagging system has no categories and subcategories. Any bag can be a starting point on the information path. People can arrange information in a free structure and can design their bag’s network in any format. Imagine a bag as a Lego block that can be assembled and connected in many ways to construct such objects as vehicles, buildings, and even working robots. People can arrange bags to construct their personal information networks in any way they desire.

Tagging and bagging differ. Tagging is used to archive individual resources for re-finding, but bagging is designed to collect individual resources to create new contents with new meanings. A bag is not a simple aggregation of individual resources but a new creation that has its own theme resulting from ordering and editing. In addition, the semantics of the connections between bags is richer than that of tags.