emergencemarketing.com

Another post about tagging. Pretty soon, I’ll rename my blog “emergence tarketing”. But what can you do? This stuff has big implications on the way we will share, publish and organize information and conversations – so I cannot stop thinking about it (I know…I need a life). The other reason I felt compelled to write about it again is that there have been quite a few good entries around tagging lately.

Over at Feedster, Scott Rafer brings us his latest views on tagging after a week of doing it (and comments on issues raised on Brian Del Vecchio’s blog – here). He believes that anonymous tagging is going to be important and that the arguments for someone to own up to a tag in order to avoid tag spamming is overrated. His posts also touch on some of the copyright issues related to tagging (here).

Ericka Menchen (here) and Ryan King (here) debate the differences between reader-based tagging and author-based tagging. Ryan argues that reader-based tagging have a distinct advantage over author-based ones.

As I wrote before (here), people will use tagging for different purposes – some to alert others of new content (author-based tags, much like people technorati tags), some to share new found information with others or merely organizing their own information for later retrieval (reader-based tags). They both have a purpose in life and as such I am not sure whether it makes sense to add more value to one than the other. It would be nice to have a system that would cluster these tags as related (i.e. the author-based tags and the user-based tags on the same content). I am starting to be convinced that Folksonomies in general will only have real value with some form of clustering.

The issue of anonymity goes beyond accountability and tag-spamming (the act of associating inaccurate or bad tags with an entry anonymously) – it goes all the way to affecting the “credibility” of a tag. If you tag anonymously and tagging is now widely accepted (so we have “tag chaos” and we all become selective about which tags we subscribe to) – can you build credibility for that tag while being anonymous? I am not a big fan of anonymity in general, but I don’t think this will work. It would be interesting to see how many people at del.icio.us subscribe to “people” tags (i.e., /plasticbag (Tom Coates), /linkorama (Ross Mayfield), etc.) rather than keyword tags (i.e., /marketing, /tools).

There will be more “tagging” related posts on this blog…not because of the hype surrounding it but because I truly believe that this is important to the way we market ourselves, build products, share stuff and get customer feedback. Just today, I had two lengthy conversations with ex friends and colleagues on tagging in the enterprise and in the new product development process.

[Technorati Tags: tag tagging folksonomies]

Grafolicious looks at the evolution of a del.icio.us tag (for example the history of the Flickr map here)

It’s cool, but I am not sure what to do with it yet (I admit that I can be slow)…

[Technorati Tags: tag history delicious]

I just ran across this piece of code to let you add a “bookmark this” link at the bottom of your post. When a reader clicks that link it posts that posting to del.icio.us. You do need an account to post to de.icio.us.

With all this random tagging going on, I wonder if some kind of organizational hierarchy will emerge over time (much like Wikipedia’s structure emerged). If it doesn’t, then all this tagging will have little value. And if people try to impose it from the top down (through some sort of standard-setting activity), I fear we will run into the same issues that KM ran into in the corporate world – people just don’t use it.

[Technorati Tags: tagging tag]

Technorati announced related tags (see Siffry’s Alerts and also improbulus). Another step forward in making this messy, emergent tagging process really useful!

[Categories: technorati tag tagging]

So I may be the last one on the blo(g)ck to talk about this. After all, Business Week this week wrote (Picking Up Where Search Leaves Off – requires subscription) about del.icio.us and other tagging services.

Awhile back I started using two social tagging services – del.icio.us and furl. For those of you who are unfamiliar with these services, check out John Udell’s screencast on del.icio.us over at Infoworld.

The service is fairly straightforward…whenever you see something you want to save, you click “post to del.icio.us” or “Furl It!” in your browser’s links section and up comes a menu that enables you to save the link, add additional comments to it and tag it with your own tags. Giving users the ability to develop a list of tagged links is very compelling all by itself…

But that is not where it stops. You can also see who else tagged the same thing as you did, and see what tags they used (and based on others’ tags you may revisit your own tags.) You can also subscribe to a tag’s RSS feed (so every time someone tags something with a tag you subscribe to, you get it in your reader) or to a person’s RSS feed (so every time that person tags something, you get it as well).

I am finally getting to the point I wanted to make – which is that I am convinced that these simple services can be very powerful in your daily fact gathering, knowledge sharing and collaboration. You could subscribe to tags that represent your competitors – even small companies return tens or hundreds of listings! You could also ask your team to tag things with pre-determined tags whenever they see something of interest and then have everyone on the team subscribe to that tag’s rss feed. You could even extend that to include customers – have them tag stuff with your company or product name when they run into something that they find relevant to you.

The other neat thing is that unlike with so many other “enterprise” applications, I do not think that you will have much of a barrier to adoption. The beauty of those solutions is that they pack enough benefits to the individual users. So they don’t have to wait until the broader community uses it to derive benefits – a common barrier to adoption in group applications.

[Categories: tagging del.icio.us furl]