Exactly how useful are tags?
Tags and tagging are a big part of the Web 2.0 ethos. Instead of sorting items into folders, you describe them with a series of words. The words you use, the ‘tags’, are up to you. Some people refer to this as ‘folksonomy’ in the sense that tags are home-grown and created by users, as opposed to putting things into folders in a tree structure decided by other people, ‘taxonomy’.
This can be useful for lots of reasons. Some of these are obvious:
The same item can be tagged with several terms. This post, for example, is about tags, but it’s also about web 2.0, del.icio.us, YouTube and flickr. It then occupies several locations in your filing system, and can thus be found in several different ways.
If you decide to bookmark it to del.icio.us or similar, then it’s up to you to decide how might you want to classify it. Your filing system comes to match your way of classifying things rather than one imposed by another person.
If your existing mental filing system can’t fit a new item, then you can simply invent new terms to accommodate it.
Multimedia, in particular, is very hard to classify using other means. The recently launched Google image labeler game challenges pairs of users to find matching descriptive words for pictures. The matching words are, of course, the tags that best describe the picture.
The big criticism of tagging is that it doesn’t work for finding things unless you think the same way as the person who tagged the item in the first place. If idiots do the tagging (viz. people who don’t think the same as me), then I’ll never find the item.
One example to show why this matters. I’ve been introduced to The Daily Show by YouTube. The YouTube filing system only goes as far as Videos>Comedy, but the clips I crave might be labelled Daily Show, The Daily Show, DailyShow, TDS or TheDailyShow. Sometimes, I might need to add Jon Stewart and (ahem) John Stewart for good measure. That’s potentially a lot of time wasted searching for clips that I could be wasting by watching them were there a more efficient way to find them in the first place.
Tom Morris states the problem neatly:
I’m a tag skeptic — I use tags on some services — del.icio.us for instance — but I think that their use is limited. A lot of people don’t grok tags — and the complete lack of tagging standards is annoying. I prefer an extensible ontology — that has outlining and multiple terms etc. Quite how you make it practical to do so is something I’m not sure about, but we can do better than tagging.
There are a couple of correctives to this, though.
Over time, standards do actually emerge for tagging items. You see the way other people tag items and you copy their technique. When I first started using del.icio.us, I used underscores a lot for my tags, such as social_media and web_2.0. Over time, I noticed that a lot of other people just shove the two words together to create socialmedia and web2.0. That started to seem a bit less messy, so I adopted that as my norm. (There is also the plus-sign brigade, who use social+media and web+2.0 — but they are just wrong ;))
Second, and thanks to Simon Collister for this one, tags help me find like-minded people. I said before that if an item has been tagged by an idiot then I’ll never find it. The point is, that by-and-large, I don’t want to find it! There’s so much information out there that what I really need to find are trusted sources. People who will recommend things that I am into.
Think about the distinction between someone who uses the tag ‘semanticweb’ as opposed to ‘web3.0′. In my little world, the first tagger is someone whose recommendation I’m more likely to trust than the latter one. The first tagger speaks my language. The lack of standards is actually an enabler to cutting through the noise and finding recommendations from like-minded people.
That doesn’t really work for my Daily Show cravings, though. But that’s not because the tagging principle is defective. It’s because of shortcomings in the way YouTube works. Only the submitter can tag items — if it worked like del.icio.us and items could be retagged according to users’ own tastes, then each relevant video could be found and tagged with the words I’d use to search for them.
Elsewhere:
Tagsonomy — a whole blog about tags and tagging
How tags change — from Tom Coates
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One of the best articles I’ve read on tagging. I have to admit I’m a tag sceptic at the moment. I can see and enjoy some advantages, but there is also quite a bit I don’t get. You’ve certainly provided food for thought — even if I am one of the social+media brigade — who are just right ;) I think, I thought, help I’m more confused than ever.
Scepticism is probably the most reasonable reaction until these services reach maturity. I think the full implications of tags are quite unnerving compared to traditional search terms. They initially seem like a simple ad-hoc filing system but ultimately might change the way we find and store items on the internet. We’re moving from trusting an algorithm to trust networks between people.
That said, it will be some time before I use something like wink to search for very specific terms as opposed to what I know works pretty well on Google. OTOH, multimedia searches already work better through tags — flickr search is already delivering much better results than Google Images. That’s why they launched the labelling initiative, I guess.
Thanks for following up my internal wranglings over tagging!
It’s a great post, but my favourite bit (and you saved it for last!) is about the way tags haven’t yet reached maturity but how when they do may change the way we search.
Deliciious’ founder talks in an interview with Blogging Businessweek that tags work by changing the linear search structure of Google. He doesn’t clarify what the opposite of a linear Google search is. Obviously, it’s a non-linear search but what does this mean and imply? Help please.
You really helped me with this, Simon.
It took Stuart’s post to crystallise the endgame for me, to be honest. It’s the next stage of progression for this approach.
I just found this on the wink blog:
“…we’re trying to do something different here. We’re trying to give search to the people. One person at a time. Who are Google or Yahoo to tell you what the best restaurants are in San Francisco? What do they know about it? Perhaps you know better and can help others out in the process?”
which, like Yahoo Answers, really helps support that idea about finding human knowledge rather than what machines can decrypt from our (my) ramblings.
Non-linear search? Crikey. I’ll have a go…
A fantastic article Ian.
I’m a huge fan of tags, more because of the impact they’ve had on my personal experience of the web from an information management and networking perspective.
A few observations — it seems to me that there is a directly proprotionate relationship between the size and diversity of the tagging community and the accuracy or ability to identify relevant search results through the resulting folksonomy. This is counter-intuitive to age-old models of knowledge and information categorisation but (and perhaps it Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds acting up again), tagging continues to deliver the goods for me and my corporate clients.
Interesting to watch how this approach to info man will evolve though…
And thanks again for a phenomenal blog — you’re prolific man!
You’re too kind, Mike. I’m enjoying your blog, too — sorry I haven’t commented recently.
Yes — you need sufficient numbers of people for there to be ‘soulmates’ among the taggers, people who talk your language.
Well, all you have to know is that they bring a fair amount of traffic to your blog — if you use them properly. Which i am only just beginning to learn how to do.
ben
[…] (The question comes from Simon Collister, who I am sure has a few ideas of his own up his sleeve. But since he wrote a fab post about tagging, which in turn fuelled my own effort on the subject, it’s definitely my turn to go first!) […]
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