Here are my raw notes from Rashmi Sinha’s talk at the IA Summit, “Sorting, Tagging and Social Information Architecture or The Missing Chapter in the Polar Bear Book “:

Who’s sick of hearing about tagging?

[Tagging provides a] focus on the individual….

Have you ever heard of “The man who could not sort”? The discussion of the Chandler card-sorting exercise reminded me of this. A man was asked to sort email into three categories. He couldn’t do it, saying “This is a waste of time.” It didn’t represent him. The test was torturing him. He finally gave up.

I noticed delicious around that time… something about categorization can be really hard, especially social categorization.

Cognitively speaking, analysis paralysis, balancing your scheme. Category boundaries change, labels become obsolete systems hide items - mistakes are costly.

The idea of “the one right category,” people really struggle with it. It’s almost an existential question

How tagging works

It maps to the cognitive process, a reduced load. It’s fun. There is self-feedback, social feedback, no balancing of scheme.

Findability is still the missing bit. Here’s where IA comes in. How do you add sorting, exploration, discovery?

How to reduce cognitive cost of categorization

Better interaction design: don’t hide item as soon as you add it to category, flat schemes [q: flatter schemes?], non-exclusive categories.

Categorization is going to make a comeback. These are all fashions. (applause)

Reference to Don’t take my folders away! Organizing personal information to get things done, the feeling of satisfaction that comes from filing things in folders.

Typical IA approach: card sorting… etc. Try it with tags

Brainstorm tags for Apple:
mac
osx
ipod
software
itunes
music
history
technology
windows
macintosh
hardware

Calculate co-occureence. Do hierarchical cluster analysis. You should get similar results if same domain (to heuristics?).

Hybrid approach: TagSorting

1. Gather terms from del.icio.us
2. Ask users to do cardsorting

Rashmi asks if anyone has done any other variation

Audience comment:
We do sorts and then ask them to tag the clusters (”how would you refer to this?”)

A lot of product and brand research involves understanding customer categorizations…

Understanding how people think… Reference to Gerald Zaltman, “How Customers Think” (2003)

Product Positioning

Consensus Building Techniques - KJ Method

• Popular in Japan
• Allows groups to quickly build consensus (back and forth between individual and group)

MindMapping for Stakeholder Analysis

• map concepts across multiple stakeholders
• Trochim’s method
  • ask stakeholders to sort statements related to issue
  • rate importance of each statement
  • create groups; through cluster analysis
  • depict importance of each group

Why tagging is sometimes appropriate…

The Web has become social

• Findings from Pew Internet Report
• internet & email play important role in maintaining dispersed social networks
• people use internet to maintain contact with sizable social networks
• people use internet to seek out others in tehir networks when they need help
• concept of networked invidualism (connetions are indiv - to - indiv)

People hang out on the web just for fun - 40 million a day (US)

of men 34%
of women 26%

age
of 18-29 37%
of 30-49 31%
of 50-64 25%
of 65 20%

Tags make the web a shared experience

• tags give you community
• other social characteristics
• social play
• stalking
• imitation
• gossip
• eavesdropping - [my addition –xian]

Concept of shared browsing, a way of socializing without having to deal with email list strife

Thomas VW: white hat and black hat stalking privacy issues

Why tagging, why now?

Pace layering: No time for consensus to emerge. Tags allow you to respond to fast-changing things. Categorization about consensus.

Problems?

No focus on early adopters. Most IAs on non tech-savvy users. Should balance that by studying early adopters.

Designers like control, but design of social system means letting go

You don’t need Jonathan Ive for MySpace, craigslist, or TagWorld. This is a completely different type of design (social systems)

Tagworld is taking over from Myspace

Menus and Tag Clouds

The tag cloud-menu is not the future…

Menus

• structured
• stable over time
• comprehensive

Tagclouds

• unstructured
• relatively unstable
• not comprehensive
• let current stuff bubble to top

To respond to hurricane Katrina, most companies added link to the home page, but Flickr and Delicious didn’t need to do anything different.

Comment from audience: Cloud shows relative importance, something easier to assess than absolute importance

Q: why did MS adaptive menus fail
A: Because it’s not just you personally - it’s the social stuff

Design of Social Systems

Serve the individual’s selfish goal.

Create a symbiotic relation (avoid mob, tragedy of commons). Think about when should the individual feel alone, when part of group. How to encourage social sharing. How much mimicry to encourage. How to accommodate local groups. How to encourage expression of alternate viewpoints. W hen to introduce social networks. H ow to encourage wise crowds. How to augment navigation with tags.

Things to Try

• Create an account on MySpace
• Read Emergence, Wisdom of Crowds
• Play a Multiplayer Online Game (World of Warcraft, Second Life)
• Play with an API (Google maps API for example)
• Think about what is fun on the web (not just tasks, work)

Q: what about bad-faith or ill-conceived early tagging, setting the wrong tone?
A: [I missed this]. Reference to Erich Von Hippel at MIT, research on lead users

Q: I don’t use tags/tag clouds to find, I search At Yahoo we use lots of tags

Q: Re tag drift, meanings change
A: Tom Coates wrote article on how the meaning of “Ajax” tag changed over time “Tags and Cultural Change”

Q: In spirit of fun and play, other good social applications in the local space (beyond DodgeBall)?
Comment: An app called Socialight out of ITP at NYU, allows you to add stories to buildings, “this is a great coffeeshop,” “there were three murders here in 1932 and everybody says this house is haunted.”

tags: iasummit2006, iasummit

I am Thomas Vander Wal and I am pleased to be invited to have a place to post and chat about the subject of tagging. I have spent much time pondering, playing with, researching, and developing tools with light metadata and tagging since at least the early 90s. I had seen tagging as only partially working, but having too many faults to be practical. That was until I came across del.icio.us. Del.icio.us seemed to change the usefulness of tagging, where tagging was completely messy prior, having an identity tied to the tag applied to the object being tagged allowed for easier means to derive clarity. Not long after Flickr added tagging to their incubating photo sharing tool. While Flickr does not provide easy means for everybody to tag information nor an easy means to see all the items an identity has tagged.

It was around this change in tagging that Gene Smith on the Information Architecture Institute asked what we should call this tagging that is bottom-up, social, and emergent along the lines of del.icio.us and Flickr. At this point I chimed in folksonomy, which quickly turned into a meme after Gene blogged about it.

Since that point I have been keeping a collections of other’s tagging and folksonomy works bookmarked in my and writing about it on my personal blog Folksonomy :: Off the Top and my more formal blog Folksonomy :: Archives :: Personal InfoCloud.

Austin Govella at Thinking and Making discusses the pros and cons of Delicious, Yahoo’s MyWeb 2.0, Magnolia, and WordPress’s in-built linkroll management system and finds them all wanting.

Preferring the tag-navigation interface offered by Delicious, Austin opts to store and manage his links and created a section of his website to present them.

Back in my first post to this blog, I said that over here at Nature we’re interested in the question of "…how far tagging can take us in tackling the (formidable) information organisation needs of modern science." Today we’re starting on a cool (I think) new experiment that might help provide some early answers.

Many of you are no doubt familiar with Matt Biddulph’s wonderful mock-up of the BBC Radio 3 website as it might work with embedded del.icio.us functionality. (See in particular Matt’s Flash movie here.) Inspired by this, we’ve just released some code that adds the same type of functionality (but this time for real) to ‘institutional repositories’ (IRs) — websites that scientists and other academics use to share their work with each other.

One general problem with IRs is that, notwithstanding services like Google Scholar, a lot of their content isn’t very easy to find, and it certainly isn’t easy to browse between related items in different repositories. Our new code aims to improve things by allowing IR users to tag articles and see links to related content, all from within the IR web page itself. Behind the scenes, the software communicates with del.icio.us and/or Connotea (Nature’s own social bookmarking service for scientists). Since Connotea is open source, it will also work with any instance of Connotea Code.

The good folks at the University of Southampton’s Electronics and Computer Science Department have now put this code on their institutional repository, creating our first real-world installation (yeah! ). Here is an example of a tagged paper. You need to enter Connotea user details for it to work (because calls to Connotea’s web API require you to be a known user). For those who can’t be bothered with that, here’s a screenshot of the sort of thing you see just below the article abstract:

The recommendations (which are generated based mainly on tag co-occurrence) already seem OK to me, but they should get better as more links and tags get entered into the system.

There’s lots of different IR software out there, and our code currently only works with EPrints, which we chose because it’s very popular, is written in a language (Perl) that we’re familiar with, and has a friendly development team just down the road from us. If you’re the administrator of an EPrints repository then you can get instructions and code from here. I’m told that it’s a doddle to install.

More information is available in this blog entry by Ben Lund, who runs Connotea for Nature. We’re really grateful to the UK Joint Information Systems Committee for funding this work and would be very interested to hear about people’s experiences, either in comments posted here or by email (t DOT hannay AT nature DOT com).

Panelists:

• Don Turnbull of U of T, Austin (and a contributor to this blog)
• Thomas Vander Wal of PersonalInfoCloud
• Prentiss Riddle of Shadows.com
• Adina Levin of SocialText (which, as she put it, had tags from when they were called categories)
• Rashmi Sinha of Uzanto

I’m going to try to group the comments into subject areas. Let’s see how well that works.

Tags going mainstream

Don Turnbull:

Who’d have thought we’d be talking about metadata on a beautiful Sunday morning in Austin?

Is tagging the key element of Web 2.0? (Probably not.) The ETech definition: Web 1.0 was the read-only web. Web 2.0 is the read-write web.

Thomas Vander Wal:

I coined the word folksonomy… and the correct definition wasn’t given in the beyond folksonomy panel.

People used to tag on the command line. Web 1.0 tagging didn’t work. Tools like Bitsy. Cory’s “metacrap” article. Web 2.0: delicious and flickr, actually useful for finding and re-finding information.

More than 40 sites are doing social bookmarking.

60 to 70 sites using tagging as their main way to bring people in. (7 travel sites, for example, using tagging as their appeal.) More than 200 services have included tagging (Amazon).

What are tags useful for?

Don Turnbull:

Are these systems useful beyond a few types of tasks or categories of information?

• Re-finding information
• Creating personal metadata
• The new command line (quicker than drag/drop, sort, click)
• Gateway to the next PIM?
• Tags as verbs (”buy,” “sell”), expanding the vocabulary (ratings: “*,” “**,” “***” etc.)
• People-centric view of data, vs. system-centric.
• Good for keeping track of things you already know about, but what about discovery?
• It’s more interesting to find a like mind than just a resource

Adina Levin:

Tagging is social, helpful to the individual and increasingly valuable to the group.

Tag games (Flickr came from the game design world), example of red and green game leading to joining the Japanese Maple group, aircraft spotters.

Jon Udell’s InfoWorld Explorer tool crawl’s delicious and aggregrates InfoWorld articles by genre, author, date, tags, title

Why is Tagging better than Categorization?

Rashmi Sinha:
I’m going to be a cheerleader for tagging

When categorizing, we choose between multiple concepts. Tagging is easier. Joshua Schachter in his infinite wisdom figured out you can just write down what comes to mind. Note all concepts instead of choosing one and invoking a hierarchy.

Better than any other social system on the web, tagging approximates the wisdom of crowds:

• cognitive diversity
• independence
• decentralization
• easy aggregation

The moment of tagging is you and that object alone (but - I interject in my mind - what about delicious’s “recommendations”? - isn’t that influence from the crowd?).

Social formations supported by tags

• ad hoc groups
• lots of weak social ties
• conceptually mediated ties

Flaws, Issues, Usability

Don Turnbull:
Are these systems usable beyond alpha geeks?

• Interface improvements: Good import? Teach vocabulary? Make re-finding information easier.
• Tag clouds probably not the answer
• Spamming, gaming, TagFraud
• Tagging is implicit (good and bad)
• Not all resources are as identifiable (microcontent?)… granular, web pages; items, commerical products
• Tags as identity (how so? i-tags?)

Vander Wal:

• “Re-findability sucks… We need to fix the re-findability problem.”
• Looks messy to others.
• No identity in Flickr. (Example: can’t see the 40 things Don has tagged with “orange”)
• Folksonomy triad (one person), dual folksonomy triad (including community) - really need slide to illustrate
• Context often missing, it gets messy, we have silos

Prentiss Riddle:
Six dirty secrets of tagging

1. It’s the content stupid
2. Ordinary people don’t get tags (text box prompt gets a sentence response or maybe a Google search) and tag clouds
3. It’s the UX, stupid - flickr guides you

4. Tags don’t play well with others (interop)

   • Character sets
   • Delimiter wars (commas, spaces, etc.)
   • Synonyms (singular vs. plural, homonyms)
   • aggregration, portability
5. Rich functionality requires rich metadata (where’s my flying car? I wouldn’t want to use them for medical applications, managing money, hunting terrorists)
6. Nobody wants “real tags” (simple keyword metadata, no control, no hierarchy, no syntax or semantics, minimal cognitive effort by the user). What people really want is “tagginess” (Stephen Colbert image)… delicious for:username, Shadows @group, geotagging, consensus tagging (sxsw2006, chosendarkness), hierarchical tagging (history.us.wwii, history.wwii.us)… it’s the oppostie of tagging

Faceted tagging: Mefeedia (by place, by content, etc.), tagginess.com is available for sale.

Adina Levin:
Tags are messy (blog, blogging, blogs) in tag clouds, compound words

Tag refactoring: consolidate synonyms, fix and standardize spelling, add hierarchy

but…
Don’t make me think, loss of tag snark, loses “bottom-up” purity, a hybrid of top-down and the group mind

Rashmi Sinha:
Tips for tag designers

1. How are you serving the individual motive
2. does the individual understand and want to fulfill that goal
3. What is the relationship between social and perosnal
4. Is it too easy to mimic the tags of others
5. Is finding all about the most popular, most tagged?
6. Enable discovery, exploration, finding new things
7. Don’t force users to do things differnetly than what come snaturally
8. Solve problems by ensuring good finability

Questions

Q: How to deal with Tag spam, tag fraud?

Thomas Vander Wal: blacklists, another reason why you need to see who tagged it and what object was tagged.

Question: How to work with synonyms and homonyms

Prentiss: Clustering at Flickr works well because they have so much rich metadata available to mine.

Adina Levin: I like delicious’s suggestions

Rashmi Sinha: In input let the user do what they want. In the findability stage deal with the problem.

Technorati tags: sxsw2006, sxsw (in case Technorati’s not picking up our native tags)

I posted my notes on the Beyond Folksonomies at SXSW at my “The Power of Many” blog.

Update: Scot Hacker took notes on this panel too.

Technorati tags: sxsw2006, sxsw (in case Technorati’s not picking up our native tags)

Mary Hodder’s got her fingers in a lot of pies, it seems. Via Scot Hacker’s foobar blog I see that she has launched a wiki site called ITags to develop draft specifications for extending the reach of tagging:

The basic idea of an i-tag … is that a user could tag an object on their own site (photo, video, sound file, text or an entire blog post) [and] the tag and the object would then go out through the RSS feed or be spidered, with some additional information that doesn’t now exist in tags.

The additional information would include the author’s identity and might include the licensing, if any, for the object.

Apparently this project was inspired by a study Hodder did last February in which bloggers “reported a number of things they wanted to do with tags on their blogs that were not possible, and were dissatisfied with some things with the Technorati tags.”

UPDATE: Via Hellonline I see that the initiative is also the work of Kaliya Hamlin (another person with a lot of irons in the fire) and Drummond Reed. I suppose for each of these names I should be able to find an Identity Commons link or some equivalent? (Update supplied so that Ross Mayfield doesn’t slam me for laziness or poor reading comprehension.)

Deb Richardson (aka dria) wrote a long thoughtful article on tagging at the Mozilla wiki a month and a half ago. I just noticed it now because I read that the Firefox team is considering some upgrades to the browser chrome and in the newsgroup post where some of the ideas were floated there was a reference to something called the “Places” UI. While reading up on that I found dria’s On Tagging article.

In it, she expresses a lack of interest in social bookmarking services (mainly for privacy reasons) but floats some ideas about how the browser could enable tagging, essentially as a replacement for the typical poor-scaling bookmark element we all know and fail to love.

“Bookmarks Are Dead,” she writes. “All Hail Tagging”:

My idea is that we replace bookmarks entirely with the tagging concept. Instead of bookmarking a page, subscribing to an RSS feed, blah blah, you just tag it. Tagging an item automatically stashes that URL into your profile’s tags file/database. If you’re tagging a web feed, it automatically turns it into a Live bookmark (although we need to get rid of the “bookmark” term entirely…it’s not a book).

I already have the Firefox delicious extension installed, so I’m ready for tightly integrated tagging directly in the browser interface.