Comments on: Tom Coates on filing vs. annotative tagging

By: The Indiana Jones School of Management

The Indiana Jones School of Management — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 02:07:18 +0000

24 Hours of FeedLounging

After a little over a day of using FeedLounge, some more thoughs …

I’m really not kidding when I say that I’m killing my Feed of Feeds installation. Just as soon as this thing is out of beta, I’m canning it. I might even s…

By: orangecutter

orangecutter — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 12:01:05 +0000

This is a little more than about individual perspectives – it’s about controlled versus public tagging.

Jon Udell’s post (thanks, budGibson) hints at what happens when editors take control of tags. Most of the blog entries on this blog have been about public tagging and its consequences – e.g. discussion of cloud tags.

Controlled (editorial) tagging leads into a whole new tag territory; one that I feel is rather under-explored. For example, what would happen if Library of Congress (as discussed in “Ontology is overrated” – http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html) had an expert group responsible not for Dewey-Decimal categorising, but for tagging? They wouldn’t have the advantages of tag clouds arising from mass tagging – they wouldn’t have the mass. But they would have other advantages, and other problems. How would they manage their workload, agree new tags, move items, etc? A whole new can of worms, I think.

By: budGibson

budGibson — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 00:32:49 +0000

This just sounds more to me like a discussion about individual perspective than a difference imposed or necessarily supported by the tools. I take both the filing and the annotation perspectives. Looking at any tagging stats (for example, Clay’s review of how one of his posts was tagged in this forum a couple of weeks ago) suggests lots of orphaned tags occur in delicious, likely because people are taking an annotative perspective.

Maybe a real world experiment would help so we could see if these possible differences in perspective had an impact. In that regard, Jon Udell is providing an assessment of Infoworld’s tagging experiment here:

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/06/03.html#a1243

Is Udell filing? annotating? or both? He seems to say both.

By: hober

hober — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 19:25:35 +0000

I’ve always been annoyed at del.icio.us’s tag listing on the right, since I have so many orphan tags. I’m definitely a tag-as-keyword person.