As I noted before in Tags and Divergence and attempted to address in Emulating Errors for Tag Convergence, tagging as practiced today could use more convergence features. While thinking about this and wiki-related problems, I came up with stickers.

I came up with the idea of stickers when I remembered the opening chapter of Snow Crash in which a girl tagged a bad driver's car with a sticker. Stickers on wiki entries? Stickers on Flickr pictures? Stickers on links?

Stickers are like graphical tags that users can attach to text or images. While textual stickers can be applied likes tags are, similar to the way adjectives work, I think graphical stickers offer better user experiences. An open system can allow users to create custom stickers and variations of stickers (like icons with modifier pieces) to help users create a graphical language. Time and effort needed to create new graphical stickers is not a liability but a convergence feature.

I think the best way to use stickers is to combine it with limits in availability and time. So a user gets N number of stickers of various types to start with and will get M more per week or month and each sticker type has specific time limits (meaning they come off after a while).

I am still not done thinking about stickers but I thought it was interesting enough as is.