Not All Tags are Created Equal
Something that came up in conversations at BarCamp and after the NY Tech Meetup (re: Gawker) were vague notions to “unify” tags across systems (e.g., Flickr, Del.icio.us, Technorati, etc.) and I was having trouble articulating exactly why this was problematic or at least why the result might not be greater than its parts. I stumbled into this transcript from E-Tech today while preparing a presenation for Monday. It’s worth a read in its entirety, but del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter nailed it with this statement:
Joshua: We have different axes of why you’re tagging, what you’re tagging, and how it happens. E.g., at Flickr you’re mostly tagging your own stuff for your purposes, at delicious it’s mostly other people’s stuff mostly for your own purposes, technorati you’re tagging your stuff for others. Calling them all “tags” over-simplifies. We need better understanding before we start plugging things in.
Emphasis added and enough said.
January 23rd, 2006 at 6:40 pm
I have spoken with Stuart about my idea for TagSpaces and he liked it in principle. We need to continue this dialog further to be sure. My idea is to simply embrace the chaos and lead by example in creating a meta-tagging system across all contexts. Much like namespaces, it is possible there is a dictionary created oneday, but all of this is still on the table for discussion.
A couple of other good articles on this are here
http://www.bmannconsulting.com/node/1544
http://sriram.wordpress.com/2005/11/04/tagspeak-models-tagback-shelley-tagback-stowe-itags-mary-tagspaces-chris/
January 30th, 2006 at 9:14 pm
The people who advise unifying tags would do well to read some Wittgenstein, especially his famous example of how the word “game” is used. The variety in tagging leads to what I conceptualize as swarms of meaning around any given instance of content, and through those intentionly disunified tagging system more valuable information about the content can be given than through any unified system.
Get used to the death of narrative, oh those of the united modernist tag project, as this “inefficiency” leads to much richer resources than simply catagorizing everything with a single taxonomy.
January 30th, 2006 at 10:04 pm
Josh, I think college is making you smarter.
February 1st, 2006 at 11:06 pm
So glad I could read a post and its comments and not see anybody talking about ONTOLOGY.