In his comments on Is Tagging A Disruptive Innovation, Simon Edhouse raises a good point that merits some further discussion. Simon says,
“Many different technologies, platforms or applications may be ‘potential’ disruptions, but may fall by the wayside, change, or join forces with other forces and be transformed and possibly end up ‘disrupting’. But I think we all know that a real ‘disruptive innovation’ needs to not cause a little disruption, but rather have a seismic affect on industries, in the “IT ecosystem” as Joe noted.”
Theories and models describing innovation, the diffusion of innovation, technology change, and technology adoption abound. But I think there are three characteristics of disruptive innovations that bear on the question of tagging.
First, *innovations are only disruptive when they change an existing ecosystem.* The retractable cup holder in cars is a good example of an innovation that wasn’t disruptive. Did anyone - besides the dashboard cup tray people (and how many of them were there anyway…?) - go out of business after cup holders became standard in cars?
Contrast this with the introduction of the personal computer. To millions of individuals and small businesses, the personal computer was simply new: it was a new opportunity to purchase computing capability for a class of needs and situations not addressed by mainframes and minicomputers. But to Data General, Digital Equipment Corporation, and the other leaders of the thriving minicomputer ecosystem, the PC was a genuinely disruptive innovation.
Second, *disruptive innovations become visible only in retrospect*. Three separate events are necessary: first, a change in ecosystem; second, recognition of that change by the parties affected; finally, a change in the framing used to understand that ecosystem by all parties. Clayton’s description of packet switching [great example!] fully supports this understanding, so I’ll share it again.
…Packet-switching is a great example of an innovation whose value / impact / disruptive nature became apparent over time. In fact, most of the telecom industry regarded packet-switch based things as irrelevant because of the low quality. But low quality also often simply means “low cost” when judged by a different standard of reference.
Third, *a disruptive innovation is often something transposed or transplanted from another frame of reference*. Cubism, Fauvism and other Modernist styles and movements reflected the influence of transplanted Asian, African and other newly recognized art cultures on Western artists and their work in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Similarly, the Dada and Surrealist movements have roots in the literary and artistic exploration of concepts and ideas from the field of Psychology.
How does this bear on tagging?
First, is the growth of tagging disrupting any existing ecosystems? Specifically, has tagging seismically affected the established IT or information management realms, the two existing ecosystems currently seen as the most likely candidates for disruption by tagging?
The consensus from the tagging community of interest is “No, but stay tuned.” Gene smith noted recently that the good people of LibraryThing are innovating their product / service offerings in ways that could directly impact the business of library catalog management, and the customer experience of a library catalog. While LibraryThing is clearly innovative, it’s not yet disrupted the information management ecosystem. Likewise, the new social bookmarking offerings from leading enterprise portal vendors reflect incremental incorporation of new capabilities, rather than wholesale shifts in the portal landscape. Flickr isn’t showing pictures of crowds of unemployed metadata management professionals standing on sidewalks outside former workplaces, holding signs that read, “Noteconomicallyviable“.
Second, is tagging disruptive in retrospect, in a way that indicates changing frames of reference? I think the answer to this is a qualified “Yes”. Tagging is in retrospect disruptive, but only for a small community. For David Weinberger and other early adopters who propose frames for a living, tagging has already passed through the two stages of disruption and recognition, and is in the midst of the third stage where it becomes part of a new or revised frame of reference.
However, for the rest of the world, though many people now tag on a daily basis (at least in limited contexts), tagging is not part of a new frame of reference. Tagging remains ‘below the cultural waterline’ in this stage of it’s growth curve.As Simon says, “To speculate whether ‘tagging’ by itself is a ‘disruptive innovation’ is, I’m sure, premature.”
Third, is tagging genuinely new, or is tagging a transplant from an existing frame? I believe social tagging is new to most frames of reference, and not a transplant. Tagging in the sense of applying labels meant to serve as some sort of metadata to a collection of resources - for a group or individual - is a very old idea. But explicitly social tagging that results in the collective creation of clouds of tags seems definitively new*.
That makes approximately one and one-half matches out of three. Hitting .500 is outstanding in baseball, but I don’t believe it is enough to qualify tagging as a disruptive innovation.
*If you consider social tagging as a straightforward transplanting of social media mechanisms and concepts to the established realms of metadata and information management, then you’re clearly a member of the small community of people that thinks about both social media and information management on a regular basis. Compared to the number of people who think about major league sports on a regular basis, this is not a large group, which takes us back to the idea that tagging is disruptive only retrospectively, and for a select community.
Before I reply to comments from KatB & Simon Edhouse on The Tagging Growth Curve, a quick reminder that this series of postings has as it’s primary point of departure the idea that the smoothly drawn analyst’s curve for describing technology growth misrepresents the noisy and unpredictable fluctuations of reality. The outcome is that this conversation is as much about the models currently in use in the technology industry for framing how technologies grow, change, and spread, as about the specifics of tagging.
At some point, it may be necessary to branch these topics in pursuit of further clarity; on either, or both in relation.
@Simon: Incremental growth along these two paths is what we’re seeing at the moment. The apparently slow increase in the size of the total population of people and organizations who’ve adopted tagging is consistent with the idea that innovation happens during those periods when the rate of diffusion is slowed, due to the increased requirements of crossing a community boundary.
A partial list of those requirements would be:
* lower cost
* rising user experience quality
* social facilitators: advocates, ambassadors, evangelists
* conceptual bridges - like ‘horseless carriage’ - to overcome the increased friction of reconciling the new and different with an old frame of reference lagging in terms of awareness and understanding of tagging
The graph charting the curve for the rate of innovation - if it’s possible to chart something as slippery as innovation - would likely appear as the inverse of the growth curve. A curve for innovation would show spikes (for quality of innovation, quantity of innovation, or both…?) during the intervals when the spread of tagging is slower.
Anyone who wants to understand the mechanisms, rates, trajectories, etc. of technology growth should really look at diffusion and innovation as they inter-relate. Doing otherwise seems like trying to understand population sizes based only on the single factor of births or deaths, but not both working together.
@KatB: Technology innovation is definitely a social process - good of you to surface that angle explicitly. Social tagging is - well - inherently social. Taking that for granted (which says a lot about my initial frame of reference), I brought in the biological model without mentioning this given.
My knowledge of the Technology Acceptance Model is limited. What makes it a good model for the new explicitly social technologies? As opposed to the previous (non-social) technologies prevalent when TAM was formulated?
My goal in suggesting punctuated equilibrium as a better model than the Gartner Hype Cycle was to explore the fit of a different way of looking at tagging than is customary for the broad IT frame of reference. That does not discounting any other kind of model directly. There may be fundamental conflicts between one or more of the various models on the table that I’m unaware of at the moment, but then I’m unaware of them 
Another question to ask in testing how well punctuated equilibrium fits as a model for diffusion is “Does punctuated equilibrium apply to open source technologies?”
Ravi of Luinuxhelp posted a mind map of the lineage of linux distributions in April of 2006 that surfaced in the open source and linux communities. The updated version of that map looks like this:
And these two images (from Patterns and Rates of Species Evolution by Michael J. Benton) illustrate speciation as it appears under punctuated equilibrium; first in general, and then specifically for bryozoans in the Caribbean.
We should keep two things in mind while considering these evolutionary charts: the illustrations come from completely different frames of reference; and apparent similarity - visual or otherwise - is no guarantee of genuine similarity on any level. But there is still compelling likeness in these renderings of the lineage of an open source OS, and “tiny colonial animals that generally build stony skeletons of calcium carbonate, superficially similar to coral”. Clearly, in the real world, linux distros and bryozoans are wildly unlike. Yet their evolutionary trajectories may show some of the same patterns at this level of abstraction.
Which means that punctuated equilibrium as a model might have something to say about open source software in general. [Here I have to say that informed contributions from the linux community are welcome, as I’m not qualified to discuss it’s workings in any detail.] And if such is the case, then punctuated equilibrium seems to correspond to the known patterns of diffusion and evolution in the two major spaces in which software technologies evolve at the moment (until another production model arises) - commercial, and open source.
And just in case there’s any question about my professional qualifications for discussing evolutionary mechanisms, it should be clear I am in no way a sociobiologist, ethologist, geneticist, evolutionary biologist, morphologist, etc. So I’m borrowing freely from other fields to seek a new model, which means I run the risk of borrowing concepts from either (or both) in ways that don’t make sense in their original contexts.
Hugh Forrest, the indomitable lead organizer of South by Southwest Interactive has announced a public process for voting on and vetting panel ideas for next year’s conference. Apparently it will take several rounds, with the first round narrowing down the 173 panel proposals.
The voting is open to anyone, but the votes of past attendees of SXSW are weighted more strongly and those of past presenters are given even further weight.
Here’s part of Hugh’s announcement:
I wanted to alert you that the online interface for panel proposals for the 2007 SXSW Interactive Festival is now live. This page allows users to give us their feedback on which of the many outstanding panel proposals they feel are most appropriate for next year’s event.
…
Complete directions for the voting process are listed on the site. Deadline for voting is September 8.
I’ve got two panel proposals in the running, the first of which takes the inspiration from its title from this blog (and should not be confused with Heath Row’s less contarian, less skeptical panel proposal with a similar name):
You’re It! Tagging is so over! It’s the People, Stupid!
Resolved: the tagging meme has overstayed its welcome. No, tags aren’t going away but they are not a user-experience panacea. Are we folksonomic yet? Some ideas about the next frontier in malleable, emergent information architectures and classification schemes. Plus, how to apply the lessons of the global social internet to more niche oriented web application development projects. Tag pioneers, theorists, and skeptics beat a dead horse.
(filed under social networks and user generated / open source)
I’ve also got this one in the running:
Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence, and Reputation Online
No privacy? Spy on yourself and commodify your attention stream! Countless representations of ourselves flood the net with information daily. What is happening to our models of attention? trust? reputation? Rate my new fighting style unstoppable and I’ll trade you this artifact I forged in Worlds of Warcraft… Expect a lively debate from noted experts on attention and identity and skeptics who think most of the sentences above are content-free.
(filed under blogging and education / sociological)
If either of these panel ideas interest you, consider voting for them. (Other tagsonomy contributors, including co-founder Jon Lebkowsky, have some great ideas in the running as well.)
I’m starting to work my way back to the tagging debate, and want to start with Gene Smith’s post from last spring at Atomiq: Market Populism in the Folksonomies Debate. Smith regards Ontology is Overrated with some skepticism, concluding that I am overstating the case for effect. He is instead trying to carve out a more reasonable position, arguing for the usefulness of tags in some limited number of cases, and peaceful coexistence with other sorts of classification schemes.
I, on the other hand, am of the unreasonable view that classification schemes are going to be largely displaced by tagging for the same reasons that search has largely displaced directories for finding things, namely that distributed intelligence, for all its faults, tends to beat the work of a professional class when dealing with large, dynamic systems.
Gene’s label for this view is market populism, which seems to me to be a misreading of what is at work here. Tagging is not a populist technology but a libertarian one — it is precisely because the populace does not need to come to a consensus that tagging better expresses both the fluidity and polyvalence of meaning than formal classification systems do. If tagging were populist, it would have all the disadvantages of classification schemes, because it is the very requirement of forced convergence on an agreed-upon set of metadata that causes the problems with classification in the first place.
Gene’s general critique, as befits his more reasonable point of view, is to point out that many institutions still use classification schemes:
The separation of the USSR into 15 or so independent states was no easy transition–politically or categorically-so I suspect the Library of Congress wasn’t the only one stuck on how to describe the Soviet Union after the fall. The Washington Post abandoned the “Former USSR” label only recently.
This is true, but is in my view merely a restatement of the problem. The Washington Post has the same dilemma as the Library of Congress because they have taken on the same (unrequired) constraints of consistency and clarity in labeling, which makes their classification schemes a poor fit for inconsistent and unclear situations.
Consider the value of the tagging approach, relative to the “One category now, another later” approach: the independent nature of Soviet states would always be represented in such a system, so long as anyone labeled things happening in Ukraine, say, with that tag. And after the breakup, more Ukraine tags and fewer USSR tags would be used, because the system would react, immediately, to the new information. We don’t yet have tag clouds old enough to take advantage of such time slices (”Show me how this has been categorized in the last month vs. the last year”), but we will, soon, and the ability to look at dynamic tag signatures will be better able to handle cases of redefinition than waiting for professional catalogers to reconsider their judgment.
He goes on in this vein, asking what I think is the key question:
(And would it be any easier to go through thousands of tagged URLs and decide which was about Georgia and which was about Azerbaijan and which was about Turkmenistan? Even with social metadata, issues of aboutness persist.)
Yes, of course it would be easier. This is what is so radical about tagging — it would be easier because other people would do it for you. It is much, much easier for new terminology to establish itself in a tagged system than in one where there is a professional group of classifiers, because going back over old material is simply too expensive. In most classification systems, the arrearage problem — the buffer of as-yet uncategorized new material — is so acute that taking time out to re-classify existing things is out of the question in all but the most extreme cases. Categorization systems favor stable categories not because the world is stable but because categorizers are busy and their time is expensive.
As for issues of aboutness persisting, of course they persist. They are in fact permanent, which is why classification systems are both unduly definitional when covering ambiguous cases, and grow increasingly brittle over time. The cataloger can’t replicate the mental models of the users better than the users can themselves, nor can they predict how stable their proposed categorizations will be over time. (These are presented as the Mind Reading and Fortune Telling problems in Ontology Is Overrated.)
This is not to say that Clay is wrong about tags being a useful, even vital, way of organizing certain kinds of information.
Coming from someone who claims to be enthusiastic about tagging, this is an oddly tepid endorsement. I’d be especially curious what kinds of things are not included in “certain kinds of information.” Tags are just labeled links; they are a useful, even vital, tool for anything that can be referred to with a URI. Which is a pretty considerable subset of everything.
The trouble is that most of the practical objections to folksonomies–as well as the arguments for a peaceful co-existence between classification schemes–have been met with the forced move response. The argument from inevitability is a great way to simultaneously sidestep your opponent’s objections while confirming your own assumptions.
In my view, people who believe that tagging will co-exist peacefully with classification schemes have underestimated tagging.
As for the ‘forced move’ argument, this is a fair cop, and I’ll try to be more explicit about why I am predicting the rise of tagging at the expense of traditional classification schemes. Note, first, that I am restricting my comments to tagging, rather than to the more general folksonomies. I think in particular that folksonomies like the Wikipedia hierarchy are making the same mistakes that older systems make. Folksonomies that take on the structural rigidities of classification schemes also take on their weaknesses.
For all the many differences between tagging and classification, the key one is cost. It is simply too expensive to hire professionals to do the work once a system that uses peer production is also available. I will in the future refrain from making generic ‘forced move’ arguments, and will instead predict that the economic advantages of moving from classification to tagging will be attractive enough to making tagging the preferred strategy among people choosing between the two.
It’s also good for keeping the discussion in the abstract rather than concrete. Because it’s a forced move, there’s no point asking why both Amazon and Wikipedia use categories. Or why does the failure to organize the whole web into a hierarchical taxonomy (like the Yahoo Directory) mean that taxonomies are useless?
I’ll take each of these three cases in turn:
Amazon is currently experimenting with tagging, because the signal loss created from categories costs them money. Amazon doesn’t want to create a mental model that I need to conform to, they want to reflect to me whatever model will help me find things most easily. Whenever anyone wants to find something and can’t, Amazon loses a potential sale.
Categories create an elaborate and expensive round trip: try to understand the users’ mental model, then reflect that in the categories, then hand those categories back to the user in hopes that it will help them find things. Tagging takes out the middle step — the tag cloud is better fit to the users’ mental model than the categorization scheme is. Amazon is only an accidental purveyor of ontology, a function that raises their costs while lowering their effectiveness. They’ll get out of that business if they can, and now they can. (The Lists feature is a kind of proto-tagging, where users organize things for one another in ways Amazon simply could not re-create with the work of professionals.)
Wikipedia’s classification scheme, as I noted above, has all the problems of older classification schemes because it is a classification scheme; being ‘folksonomic’ or whatever isn’t magic pixie dust. Wikipedia classification is the usual mess we get with such systems: Toys are in Personal Life while Food and Drink is in Culture; Agriculture is in Technology, but not Society; Sociology is in Society but not Science, and so on. It reads like something out of Metacrap. And, possibly as a result, no one actually points to the Category: pages on Wikipedia.
To offer a prediction, both Amazon and Wikipedia have seen the high-water mark of the usefulness of their respective categories; both will shift to include tagging more natively; and you will see some of those changes in the next 12 months.
As for Yahoo, the failure to organize the whole web shows us that there are limits to the effectiveness of classification in systems that have three characteristics: large size, heterogeneous content, and dynamic growth. Sound like any data sets you know?
Even more surprising is how low those limits are. DMOZ claims to have 4.6M unique URLs classified, and claims to have surpassed the size of Yahoo’s directory. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that 4.6M is the largest publicly available set of classified URLs. Del.icio.us is larger than that now, and it’s currently adding 20 or so new URLs a minute.
Most organizations will not be able to support even a fraction of the effort that went into the Yahoo or DMOZ directories, and given the examples of tagging systems that have already blown past those limits, the constraints of scale alone will push a number of groups away from formal classification, as the volume of material they want to cover grows even to hundreds of thousands of things. More importantly, the superior economic model of tagging as a by-product of self-interest, best described by Dan Bricklin in The Cornucopia of the Commons, will mean that even before those limits are reached, tagging will be the more attractive choice on practical grounds.
Or, like, do you seriously mean that tagging will replace all other kinds of categorization? Across the whole freaking web? Surely not.
That ‘Surely not’ is an argument from personal incredulity, and one I think I can dispel by re-stating my position: Yes, I really do mean that tagging will replace other kinds of formal categorization. Across, like, the whole freaking web. Modeling the group mind with the group mind is both better and cheaper than making some small formalize their guesses on behalf of the larger group. When labeling strategies are concerned, it’s formal, accurate, large: pick two.
The only asterisk I’d place on that belief is for cases where forcing intellectual conformity on a user base is both desirable and feasible. We want there to be general agreement as to the categories of mental illness or distress, and the American Psychiatric Association has both the authority and wherewithal to produce that agreement in the US. But those cases are rare, and even when they are on balance desirable, their existence as a single source of doctrinal authority creates perverse incentives like the fight over defining homosexuality as an illness.
But, as with Amazon, most places that offer digital categorization are only in the expensive and frustrating business of classification because they wrongly believe that is the best way to serve their users. That will change.
One can be enthusiastic about tags and folksonomies (I am) and still confront the serious problems that face them as a stand-alone tool for organizing information. Turning a blind eye to those problems is what turns strange zeitgeist into irrational exuberance.
This is both correct and a key point. I didn’t discuss this in Ontology is Overrated because I hadn’t yet understood it back in March: tags do indeed have serious problems as a stand-alone tool for organizing information, and compared to formal classification schemes, tags are not an acceptable replacement.
But tags aren’t a stand-alone tool. Tagging is the first post-search tool for information organization; tagging only makes sense in a world where Google has already become normal. Traditional cataloging systems, for all their faults (faults well understood by the catalogers themselves, I might add) had one clear reason for their continued viability: there was no real alternative. Pre-digital finding tools — book indices and card catalogs and thesauri and so on — were the only game in town.
No longer. Full text indexing, link analysis, trust networks, and related techniques now accomplish about 80% of what classification used to do for us. The reason I wrote, earlier, that tagging is displacing classification, rather than replacing it, is that tagging is merely handling the residual value that comes from labeling in a world where search has already taken over many of the important functions previously handled by classification systems.
The question is not whether tagging systems can do everything formal classification schemes used to do — they can’t, but they don’t need to. The question is: which is a better fit for the requirements of labeling in a post-search world — tagging, or formal classification? And my answer is tagging.
This is, yes, irrationally exuberant. To predict that something that’s been around less than two years is going to displace an activity that’s been around for centuries is, well, you can provide your own label for that belief yourself, but it’s a safe bet ‘rational’ won’t be high in the resulting tag cloud. But here’s the thing: you can’t understand technological change if you assume that new systems replace existing ones when the new systems outperform the existing ones.
One of the seminal moments for me in understanding the net came reading Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method. Feyerabend, a historian and philosopher of science, pointed out that new theories don’t in fact spread because they better explain the facts than old theories. They spread because they are a better mental fit, even when they explain fewer of the details.
One of his examples was the switch from geo-centric to a helio-centric view of the motion of the planets. The calculations of the motions of Mars made with geo-centric models, with all their retrograde motion, were highly accurate, and when the helio-centric model first appeared, it was a less useful for predicting Mars’ position than the well-debugged geo-centric tables. The increase in quality came only after the mental shift to helio-centrism happened, because once they had understood the new model, they then took on the job of building new tools.
That’s tagging vs classification. Formal classification has centuries of practice supporting it, while tagging merely has a handful of early, incomplete examples. As a result, tagging does not have anything like the sophistication of classification systems — for tagging to work broadly and well we still need, inter alia, group tags; private tags; better user-defined thesauri; better tools for discovering latent communities; better tools for making time series; better routing labels like for: and via:; better traversal of the resulting for/via graphs; and ways of turning a collection of tags into site navigation, a sort of permanent card-sorting game that continually optimizes site navigation. For tagging to take over from classification, we need all those things and more, and we don’t have them.
But tagging is already better fit for discovering and reflecting both personal and group mental models; does a better job of handling ambiguous or dynamic cases; provides judgment-related context (’funny’, ‘cool’); allows better mapping to communities of the like-minded; and is, on top of all of that, cheap cheap cheap. These advantages are driving adoption, and the early adopters are now suffering from the lack of well-developed tools, but new inventions will arise to service those users, and this will lead to more later-but-still-early adopters, sharpening the problems further but with a bigger user base, thus increasing the incentive for still more improvement, lather, rinse, repeat.
You could make a lot of money or win a lot of bar bets when thinking about the digital realm if you compare technologies between hard or easy, rigorous or sloppy, sophisticated or naïve, expensive or cheap, professional or amateur, and then bet on the things that have the most checkmarks in the right hand column. Tagging has a checkmark in all those boxes.
