Tags are deeply entrenched in the Web now - and likely enterprises. But - here's the question we all ask - "But are the tags that people create really an effective way of describing information so that it can be found and managed, folded and put in the right drawer?" Mr Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger, extols social tagging.
Cathy Marshall undertook her own study, in which she gathered and closely analyzed the metadata on 322 Flick images of the floor of the Galleria in Milan. She looked at tags, descriptions, and title - and found more useful words in the latter two. Tags, she said, "can be a rich source of noise"... "The message here is almost painful: a great proportion of user tags add little or no further information; as such, they don't appear as often in narratives or titles."
Could they be made useful? Taggers would have to be more specific - and that's not likely to happen.
2 comments:
I'd be careful not to overgeneralize here. For example, what do you make of the ESP Game? I think the other problem is that we mean so many different things by "tags". Would you consider the terms supplied by authors to describe documents as "tags"? We've certain found those to be useful--and recyclable too.
Thank-you for your comments.
Cathy Marshall was presenting a unorthodox view rarely voiced - and it intrigued me for that reason.
But she did her test on photos uploaded to Flickr. Those tags and tagging practices may not represent all tagging applications. Certainly librarians building collections in delicious or other social bookmarking tool think carefully about tags that will best describe the item (although, I suspect they'd much rather use proper metadata tools). Some individuals will do the same. One tool, Zigtag, even supports a controlled vocabulary.
I would guess that for individuals there will always be some element of personal interest in tagging - the tag is a reminder of what is so special about the item.
I also read - somewhere - that often the words used for tags on documents / web pages also occur in the title or description. It's just easier and practical.
So - yes there are many meanings to tags - and their application could be different according to the situation - photos from trip to Milan, vs research into economic history of the city, vs the author (as you suggest) offering some index terms.
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