Web 2.0 Architectures

The Declarative Living and Tag Gardening Pattern

Also Known As

Terms associated with the Declarative Living and Tag Gardening pattern include:

Ambient findability

The pattern of Declarative Living and Tag Gardening is similar to the concepts discussed in Peter Morville’s book Ambient Findability (O’Reilly). In this book, Morville describes several of the problems related to semantic declarations.

Social networks

While many people think of social networks as the rage of Web 2.0, social networks are in fact as old as society itself. What is truly new are the ways we have found to “declare” our social networks, or fractions thereof, on several Web 2.0 platforms. Most notable of these have been MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

Business Problem (Story)

In conversations around the world, people are constantly expressing their preferences and opinions. In other words, we live declaratively. We declare who our friends are and who our acquaintances or business colleagues are. We talk about the videos, music, books, art, food, and so on that we’ve encountered, the people that inspire us, and the people we’d rather avoid. It’s no different on the Web, except that on the Web we can make these declarations explicitly through common formats and technologies (such as tags, as discussed in the preceding section on the Collaborative Tagging pattern), or we can leave a trail of digital breadcrumbs and let other people draw their own conclusions. In both cases, others can capture ...