I’ve been thinking more about Daryl’s explanations of tagging in Flock, and Wil Wheaton’s reticence to embrace tagging. I share Wil’s feelings: for example, I’ve been blogging for years, but I can’t bring myself to put Technorati tags in my posts. I’m doing it on this particular post just because the post is about tagging itself, so I figure I gotta do it.
Tagging strikes me as a short-term solution to a set of long-term problems.
Problem #1: the inability to quickly organize my stuff (photos, emails, web site favorites, mp3′s, etc).
Problem #2: the inability to quickly get to other people’s stuff. (Pretend Google doesn’t exist yet.)
Tagging attempts to solve both problems by having human beings like you and me assign tags (keywords and short descriptive phrases) to items. Take this particular blog post, for example – to describe it, I might choose the words "tagging", "Flock", "favorites" and "search". Later, when I’m looking back for all of my prior blog postings about Flock, I could search my blog for all of the entries with the keyword "tagging", and presto, I’d find it.
That does solve problem #1. Now, for problem #2. Let’s say someone else – actually, let’s pick you, dear reader – want to find all of the blog entries on the internet about tagging. You’d do a Technorati search for the tag "tagging", and presto, I’d be in the list.
Or would you?
What if you were trying to get started organizing your stuff, and you picked the keyword "organization"? You wouldn’t find me – even though syntactically, this post has a lot to do with organization.
My problem with tagging is that given the same piece of stuff to organize, two people will often pick completely different tags to label it with. When I first started using Flickr, I couldn’t decide whether to tag some of my photos with MiamiBeach, SouthBeach or SoBe. Surely I shouldn’t have to use all three of them, right? But which one should I pick?
Take two librarians, give each of them the same 1,000 books, and tell them to organize the books. Thanks to the Dewey Decimal System, we can be fairly certain that both librarians will end up with a highly similar organization system.
Now imagine that each librarian could set up multiple organization structures for their library. For example, they could file books in the Dewey Decimal System, AND maintain another set of identical books by author lastname/firstname, AND another set of identical books by title. That’s how tagging works: a single book can be assigned multiple tags. That’s quite cool, but still, even with this multi-dimensional threat to organization, we can be fairly certain that both librarians will create similar organizational dimensions. Good stuff.
But the internet is not run by librarians, and there is no virtual Dewey Decimal System. Tagging lets anybody order their stuff in any way they want, and there’s no standard or consensus.
Take two people, give each of them the same 1,000 photographs, and tell them to organize the photos. They can use assign as many tags as they’d like to each photo. In reality, they won’t take a whole lot of time on each photograph’s tags, but they’ll probably assign 2-3 at least. At least, let’s hope they do.
In our two examples, how easy would it be to find a single book in each of the two libraries? How easy would it be to find a single photo in each of the two libraries?
Scale this up to the real world: right now, there are an estimated 117,664 libraries in the US. I’m not even going to guess how many photos there are, let alone how many blogs, mp3′s, etc. Then toss in languages: the web has content in every language imaginable, and it would be inexcusably small-minded to think that every photograph will be tagged in English.
Letting individuals assign their own unique tags to their content can solve the personal organization problem, but it’s not going to solve the worldwide organization problem.
I’m not suggesting an alternate solution – I’m just explaining why I haven’t bought into the tagging thing yet. I’m not saying I won’t in the future, but it ain’t there yet.
technorati tags: tags, Flock, favorites, search
