In March 2007, I was invited to do a talk at the Bay Area ACM meeting about tagging and Flickr. I did not write out the talk in long-form so there are only slides which may or may not make sense on their own. This is the blurb I submitted for the talk:

The "Scribblenet" is a gentle romp through the design and philosophy of walking the line between making it easy enough for people to bother putting data in to a system and still useful enough to make it worth the trouble of getting it out again.

Using the Flick API (commonly known as "Application Programming Interfaces" but perhaps better understood, today, as "Anti Platform Initiatives" or "'Architecture of Participation' Interfaces") and machine tags as examples, the talk will discuss why applications, and developers, should open up and let go as a first step in building computing's elusive "Do What I Mean" engine.