Just came across a very interesting notion called “tag drafting”. Most of us are familiar with sites like del.icio.us, stumbleupon and Technorati (if not, join the revolution today) and are developing our own ways for using these sites effectively.
Here’s another philosophy to increase your efficiency and effectiveness in finding interesting sites. Drafting is a phrase also used in racing, where it means that cars get behind each other (especially at high speeds) to decrease air resistance. Tag drafting is essentially the same thing, using the momentum of tags to find information in an efficient way. You basically keep an eye on a particular topic, let’s say “internet”, but it’s more effective to filter out what you want (eg. “internet + law + blogs”) so that you get a rather specific feed of what you want… because, the great thing about all these web 2.0 sites is they have RSS feeds, so you can easily keep an eye on these self-created channels.
You could also start tagging a lot and after a while some sites will recommend similar users to check out (StumbleUpon does this). Keep an eye on these users… because soon you won’t have to do any searching for yourself anymore and these users (who all have their RSS feeds) will provide everything for you.
Quite a simple way to do things, I was already doing it, but the phrase tag drafting is just great for it, because it describes exactly what it is.
For more, check out another post from the same blog where Sean goes into the Visualization of Tag Drafting:
http://communitygrouptherapy.com/2007/05/29/visualization-of-tag-drafting/
