Gary on Tagging
March 27th, 2006Gary Price and I don’t agree on everything and tagging is always a hot topic when we hang out. I like to get his thoughts on tagging every so often to ascertain if he has changed his views. Well, apparently, he hasn’t. Take a look:
“Yes, tagging can be very powerful and useful for very individual or small focused groups like an eight grade class or a group of friends or co-workers. To be useful to the masses (if/when) it reaches mainstream/widespread is another matter. Is the point of tagging to make information retrieval more precise for a large group of users? Why? Synonyms, pluralization, etc. Also, spam and gaming the system. This is another topic NOT addressed in the article. What would stop someone reviewing the most popular tags and then including these tags in every item they post? I’m sure with several logins and a script this could be achieved quite easily. We all know what happened to the meta-keyword content tag. Aside from spamming, for tagging to save effort and make retrieval more precise, something I’ve called structured or fielded tagging (location field, author field, date field, etc.) is needed. The Catch-22 is that most people wouldn’t do it. Others would say that in some cases on the open web, a document or other item should speak for itself and let technology like dynamic clustering, audio transcription, content-based image retrieval, etc., do the work for the masses. Again — on a personal or small group level — it’s another matter. The same might also be true when it comes to small specialty or vertical databases. Librarians know that everyone isn’t a cataloger. Btw, standardization amongst tags and tagging services is needed.”
I personally love tagging as use it for ongoing research in diffeent fields of study (CI, book stuff, etc). But Gary is right on one thing. Tagging is not a “taxonomy”, using the strict sense of the term. It’s personal clasification. And it’s deeeel.icio.us!