I’m still not sure most of us would agree that the amount of thought and time put into tagging systems and tagging resources is worth the while.
I talked about some issues related to making and using tags at this year’s South by SouthWest Interactive Conference (SXSWi). Let me start out with some of those ideas here and add a few new ones just to set framework for our conversation:
Tags are good because:
- They show a user’s view of the data
- When in a hypertext system, they provide easy ways to sort and browse data
- They help with search because they may offer additional keywords for a resource that aren’t in the original resource
- Experts are not good at describing every possible keyword or concept that may apply
- Tags are additional (meta)data that can be analyzed by information retrieval systems
Tags are bad because:
- Experts may be a little better at describing resources (assuming that experts are the one posting and creating the resources in question)
- Tags may be too focused on one community of users for wide utility
- Once tagged, a dynamic resource may change, but the tags may not necessarily be updated to reflect this change
- Tags are just another system of resource identification to spam, spoof and game (especially tags as links to Web pages)
Do you agree? Disagree? What did I leave out?
I think that, whether or not tags are good or bad, depends upon the purpose of tagging. In your lists above, it seems that classification/categorization/data organization is the primary purpose of tagging.
As such, I think that it has good points and bad. But what if that isn’t the main purpose of tagging? What if the main purpose of tagging is allowing a dispersed group of loosely coupled users to bring together a wide-variety of information and consolidate, via the tags, into a single attention stream? That is a totally different use than classification etc and would result in a very different set of benefits and drawbacks.
Comment by ext337 — July 6, 2005 @ 7:26 pm
Tags are just a tool and like any tool, it can have a lot of value and utility and it can also be abused. The key question is also what problem are you trying to solve? If the answer is that you want to make it easier for every person to save, share, and retrieve information then tags are by far superior.
If you are trying to help the average user, then the “bad” examples that you listed do not apply.
- Experts can never be better at saving my information. This is something only I can do. If I save a link on blinklist for example, then only I know what tags I want to use. We can use an auto-suggestion script to make the task easier for the user but experts don’t know what a certain site means to me.
- While tags can be too focused, that is their inherent advantage. When I blinklist a site, then the tags are my mental notes and pictures of what I remember.
True, when I try to share links with many users, we all have to agree on the same tags so it can get more difficult for a broader group. However, even here search filters can help point users in the right way and tagging is far more flexible and scaleable. After all, dmoz never scaled.
- Yes, dynamic information might change and make tags obsolete. This is true but the same would apply in an expert system. Someone would have to update this information.
- As long as I use tags for myself or withing a set group of users (either a community or a social network) then they cannot get spammed. The spamming will happen if you open it up broadly and sure enough, there are people spamming blinklist. This is a challenge and will hurt the utility and usefullness of blinklist as a broader discover engine.
This is perhaps one of the toughest challenges to solve. While tagging is great for personal and group sharing, retrieving, and finding (knowledge management) the utility for broader discover will only work if tagging gains critical mass and the discover engines figure out how to keep listings clean and the spammers out.
Wikipedia has managed to maintain a user generated site pretty well. Perhaps the tagging sites will find a way to solve the problem too.
Comment by blinklisters — July 6, 2005 @ 9:31 pm
Thanks for the excellent comments. I’m skeptical of some of my own points (look for some thing on the fallibility of experts soon), but thought they’d be good to start a conversation.
I think you could still argue that the idea of using tags to put things into a “single attention stream” (that’s a great phrase) is another type of sharing, and perhaps instead of categorizing items in the traditional sense is categorizing them by users, a group of users or even a set of popular topics with its own set of terminology (and values) by those users. Tags can be a tool for building, even establishing a community - that’s what we’re trying to bootstrap here at Tagsonomy.
It just may be that tags aren’t just any tool, they could be thought of as “meta-tools” (did I just say that?) or tools that help organize other tools. With the abundance of virtual information, we may need several levels of abstractions or even several points of view for a set of information - tags may give us a new facet for this. True, no one is going to match your mental model tag for tag, but it just might be possible that experts (or systems they design) can help with *additional* tags or facets of identification, perhaps even with your own syntax based on an understanding of information use behavior, cognitive abilities, linguistics or just plain old, people who have already been thinking (and tagging) about your area of interest. The vague advantage of my statement is that I just expanded experts to include system, but also pull it out of the ivory tower of taxonomy specialists to include someone who knows a lot about a subject (and maybe, just maybe remembers what it was like to begin learning about that subject).
Hopefully, we’re seeing that people are learning good “tagging grammar”, as you can see I prefers lowercase_with_underscores, but that’s probably not the best ForSomePeople. Again, a decent information retrieval system can find those alternative grammars, spellings and even methods to add tags to help encourage good tagging principles. I’m happy to farm out my update tasks to some kind of system (or better yet, a system that encourages my fellow taggers to keep things updated for new resources or changed ones) but yes, that kind of openness is susceptible to spam which begins the arms race of adding and deleting. Hopefully we’re all using these systems because we will take the benefits even with the cost of the detriments.
Tagging for personal use is certainly the first, big win for most people, and maybe the only one they’ll have. Trust in the community, in the system to keep the tagging system up and in quality of information are going to be some of the next wins if we can perform well enough on the data analysis and mining tasks that I look forward to.
Comment by donturn — July 6, 2005 @ 10:28 pm
This is an area that we’ve thought a lot about at TechCrunch. When talking about tagging I think its important to distinguish between user tagging and publisher tagging.
Publisher’s have an incentive to tag and tag correctly, but there is also a large incentive to spam. Automated systems can help with this, but spammers will always get through when the data is so thin.
User tagging is (or can be) much deeper for any given URI. It seems like this is what you are focusing on above. There are many ongoing experiments here and we’ve written about a bunch of them at TechCrunch. The bottom line is that the users need a good incentive to tag correctly, and you can get very good data by combining the tagsets. Services that have a good user incentive include delicious and furl (people want to find this stuff again later). Feedster’s current solution seems to lack any user incentive whatsoever, and so very bad (and/or very little) tag data is created. So good user incentive = possibly good data. No user incentive = bad or no data.
I also think that there are simply too many new tagging “communities” sprouting up and that the masses won’t want to use many of them. They must find a way to interconnect or most will fail to generate deep enough data.
I bet delicious is generating some great tag data though that could feed one heck of a search engine one day…
Comment by Techcrunch — July 6, 2005 @ 10:39 pm
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Yes, there are pros and cons of tagging.
However, I believe that tagging can take on two purposes (which each have their own pros and cons). Many people who use tags fall into one or the other.
First, that of a personal bookmark system. In this way, tagging need only make sense to the user. This is an extreme advantage because one can find bookmarks or classification from their own choosing.
Secondly, tagging can be seen as a classification system for general, or group, use. Tagging must be conventional in this domain for it to make sense for the group as whole.
I wrote more of my thoughts on this issue here.
Comment by hardscrabble — July 10, 2005 @ 8:37 am
Tags are good for adhoc categorization of unique categories - so, for example, XMLSchemaUserExperience2005, is an excellent (if long) example of a tag that allows a group of bloggers and flickr users (etc..) to aggregate content associated with this recent W3 meeting.
Tags are no good at all for conventional categorization - mainly because the consensus on usage is not well defined.
Comment by stevenzenith — July 17, 2005 @ 3:29 am
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