Weekend Tagging Thoughts
April 22nd, 20052 interesting posts came across my aggregator today on folksonomies. First, after a post on how “easy” it would be to implement tagging into the library catalog, Geoffrey Harder mentions that del.icio.us is working on a “bundling” tool, which brings feeds on topics in one place, or bundle. Great idea. To see what bundles look like go to
http://del.icio.us/settings/YOURUSERID/bundle
I’ll try to make some bundles next week if I get a moment (and remember to do it).
Also, remember my post on why I thought tagging your own blog posts was wrong (I had a hard time articulating why - it just seemed wrong to me). Today, I read why Scott Rafer thinks it’s wrong too:
“I’m signed up for Delicious-founder Joshua Shachter’s religion on this point. Simplified, that belief is: tagging other people’s content has value, and tagging one’s own content leads directly to spam. This idea is consistent with the reasons blogging has been so incredibly successful. One of the main applications of blogging is to comment on news stories and other people’s blogs. The primary value added by the blogger in this case is annotating someone else’s writing.”
That’s why my belly barometer went off when I saw librarians tagging their own content (trust your gut, Steven). It’s spamming the system. Sure, they may be building up their own metadata (it’s very useful in that regard), but they can do that locally on their own desktops. Leave it out of the collective knowledge base that is del.icio.us.
Tagging your own content can be equated somewhat to sending out spam e-mails of your products to thousands of people. The only difference is that the user has voluntarily signed up for the tag feed and spam e-mail is sent without permission. The point is, there is no need to pimp your own blog posts. If at least one person finds it worthy, it will be tagged. Let your blog posts speak for themselves.
That said, it is going to be very difficult to stop tag spam from overcoming del.icio.us, but there will be a solution. Whether it’s a rating system or something else, social tagging will have a spamless future….I hope.