i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

During last class, while Bob was talking about bad tagging techniques, he wondered why would anybody tag a bookmark on Delicious "tagthis?" A big banner in red started flashing in my mind saying: "Gaming The System" Looking deeper into the issue, "tagthis" seems to be more innocuous than I first imagine. Apparently it was generated by tagth.is, a service that bookmarks links in tweets. This however does not deny the fact that social news networks are being actively gamed by a small but extremely devoted group of people.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is reporting that the the US government's classification and safegauring of sensitive in information is in complete disarray [PDF]. The problem it seems that there are at least 130 different labelling for such information. Here are 20 out of the 130 possible clearance labels: