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.
