Interesting discussion on tagging over at many-to-many
David Weinberger picks up on an older post from Tom Coates at Plasticbag on tagging - which leads to an interesting conversation over at many-to-many (disclosure - I accepted to join Corante as a partner - more on that later).
As a reminder - the original post posits that tags for blogs change over time for three reasons:
- the content changes
- people start using new terms (i.e., Ajax) to describe things
- it is a reflection of the fact that people tag differently - and that their tagging habits change over time (which I guess could also mean that your readership is shifting)
Tom further elaborates on that last point by identifying two different types of taggers - those that tag as an act of filing and those that use tags as annotations (much like when you tag Flickr photos).
David thinks that most people do both. They file (or folder) when they do it for themselves and they tag when they want to contribute to a social tagstream.
I agree with the fact that most people have multiple tagging behaviors depending on what they’re doing. But I also think that there are more than two tagging behaviors. Some do tag as an act of filing - that is very much how you use your categories on your blog or how some people use delicious or furl. Some do tag to let others know that they found something which might be of interest to them (as some do through delicious - knowing that others subscribe to a particular tag). Others use it to alert others that they wrote something that might interest others (much the way people use Technorati tags). And lastly you have those that use it to annotate something for re-publishing (much like people are using delicious tags to comment on something they see on the web - only to have it being re-published on their blog).
I guess you could lump the latter three together into one category - but for me they are different enough to threat as three distinct cases of tagging. The difference between the first and third behavior is also why I think it makes no sense for Technorati to pick up categories as tags.
[Technorati Tags: tag tagging social bookmarking social tagstream]
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July 22nd, 2005 at 1:01 am
I would second your opinion that people do tagging for various reasons. This is what inspired us to create a different kind of “Tag Manager” on our new bookmarking site. I thought you might want to take a peak at BlinkList.
Here is also a review on BlinkList that came out today:
http://blendededu.com/2005/07/blinklist-learning-in-blink-of-eye.html
We are still a tiny company (scarry given Yahoo! is now in the space) but are very passionate about it and would love to hear any feedback from new users.
Mike
July 22nd, 2005 at 5:39 pm
I really see this as just 2 tagging ‘modes’: 1) tagging for yourself, and 2) tagging for others. Of course, 1) and 2) can and often are done as one.
As far as annotation vs. filing goes, I have to admit I don’t quite see the difference in the end. You can call it annotation, filing, categorizing, labeling, etc., but in the end it’s a flat tagging system, unless you fake:hierarchy:through:tags.
Perhaps when you say “filing” you are thinking of a situation where a user has a set of filing spots, a set of categories, and has to fit an item into those categories, and when you say “annotating” you think free-form keywords that we now popularly call tags. If that is so, then I’d argue that using tags to mimic filing into categories counters the whole tagging idea. Categories are too limiting. Think about categories as human races. In a world that is more and more mixed, lots of people no longer fit into any of the traditional race categories. Ideally, people could tag themselves with “racial tags”, and give each of them weight. For a lot of people that would be a much more accurate way of describing who they are.
Funny, I just read the original blog posts and their mentions of keywords vs. tags. When I first created Simpy[1] I used the term “keywords”, but everyone was going nuts about “tags”. In my eyes they were the same thing, or at least very close.
[1] http://www.simpy.com/