Views on Tagging

Tagging is very hot right now on the public Web. Del.icio.us and Flickr.com are most famous for it. People at Furl.net do it. Technorati has adopted it. And those using the new Yahoo MyWeb2.0 can do it. Tagging is the act of adding keyword terms for an article or bookmark, or, in the case of Flickr, a photo. Collectively these tags are called folksonomies.

There have been a few articles on this phenomenon (or craze depending on your point of view.)

Daniel Terdiman at CNET feels that 'Tagging' gives Web a human meaning (Nov 16, 2005). Cory Doctorow of the popular blog BoingBoing is quoted as saying, ""We've had this decades-long program of top-down metadata. People (were asked) to go out and become familiar with one ontology and to make sure data is categorized like this. But people are not very good at this ...". With tagging, people use words that mean something to them. It's not mentioned that one person's category for technical support may not the be same as another's.

These tags may be more useful to communities that share interests - perhaps smaller work groups. Brad Hill sees tagging as a "tool for collaborative social use". There is mention in this article that some corporations are adopting tagging internally.

""In a corporate environment, the interests are narrower than all the human interests on the Web and the vocabulary becomes narrower," said Dave Weinberger, a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center."

There are other examples that show the potential in tagging - especially the one where people re-classified George Orwell's 1984.

Will these tags help in general web search? The editors at SearchEngineWatch are sceptical.

Danny Sulivan wrote that Tagging Not Likely the Killer Solution for Search (Mar 22 2005) - tags are wide open to abuse by spammers, and search engines have learned from past experience to ignore them. Sullivan, himself, doesn't find that tags (or categories in directories for that matter) much help in search. He prefers, as do so many, keyword search - the "warp drive to zip you to what you wanted". In Yahoo My Web Tagging and Why (So Far) It Sucks (June 30, 2005) , he describes the many weaknesses to tagging, among which is the sheer effort involved in browsing tags and trying to assess which would be most relevant. People have been disinclined to use directories even though directories contain hand-picked and reviewed sites. Why would they spend time with other people's tags? Automated classification is probably more effective as a search aid.

Where will it work? Maybe, just maybe, where people can choose terms from an established list. Chris Sherman says in Where Tagging Works: Searching for a Good Game (Nov2) that it can work if there is a controlled vocabulary in the background and points to the success of Millions of Games.

"The site uses controlled vocabulary (called "Gameology") to describe categories (arcade, shooter, puzzle, etc). Although you can also add your own free-form tags, these category tags are well known to most users, so there's little ambiguity about what the tags mean.""

Will people spend time tagging with or without a controlled vocabulary? For photos they will, since, as many have noted, that's the only way you can find them again. But will they for articles, documents, and other text items? Would people even tag their email? We'll see. This will play out on the Web first.