Tagging Archives
Are tags actually anything more than easy-to-deal with categories?
I meant to write up this great entry on tagging when I read it last week. Unfortunately I didn't have time, but now I do and better late than never, right? The entry is a bunch of points about tagging (hence the "bottom up"), some are very interesting, some are less. The one that jumped out at me most was actually the very first one:
Tags are not organizational innovation they are an interface innovation. The difference between a tag and a category is non existent except that the interface threshold to create a tag is so low that people actually do it regularly.
This is a very interesting argument and one I agree with in many ways. For me, tags on del.icio.us act as a categories. I organize my links into all these various buckets. The big difference between this scheme and the folder scheme you encounter in normal file structures is the ability to cross-post something. Again, though, I could cross-file anything, even in a real file cabinet, if I felt like making multiple copies and keeping them all updated across multiple folders. With that said, I think it's true that it's just an interface innovation: tagging makes it easy to categorize and cross categorize. There's no clicking, dragging or anything else, you just type in a bunch of words and viola, you're done.
That, however, is not the only use of tags, and I think this is where it becomes an organizational innovation. Once you remove tags from your own personal area and extend them across an entire system you've got a whole new way of organizing. Because one most systems tags can be viewed across multiple users, they become a way to easily organize without any interaction. They become the ultimate bottom-up organization tool. As I've written in the past, "Tagging is a great way to create a community without having to develop any additional backend." There's no need to start a new email list or a new forum topic, you can begin to organize, or join others simply by tagging something with the same term or terms. In that way it's more than just an interface innovation.
I also believe that the possibilities of tagging as an organization innovation will become more and more apparent as we use tags for more. Tags are a form of metadata and their biggest impact may come down the line, as people become more comfortable with tagging and thus metadata. With a population used to attaching this additional information, we can begin to analyze and even ask them to attach additional levels. The deeper we go, the more context we add. The more context we add, the more value. The more value . . . I'm just not sure.
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By allowing anyone to tag their own content on their own site, people can organize in an informal and decentralized way.
I like to think that I'm willing to admit that I'm wrong (clearly not true). While I don't necessarily think I ever came out and said it, I have had trouble understanding the value of
Technorati tags. I never got how there was any value in tagging my posts for other people. While I still think it's a flawed system (especially because of it's spamming potential), I had an "aha moment" about it this morning.
While I was reading this IF post about "leveraging folksonomies" (paid subscription required), I realized that Technorati tags allow people to do the thing I find most innovative about tagging: Create impromptu, non-centralized communities without the need for any additional infrastructure (like creating a new group in Yahoo! Groups).
It was this seemingly innocent (and obvious) paragraph that sparked it:
An example this week was the 10blogs tag. A group of bloggers decided to suggest what 10 blogs they'd take to a desert island. Instead of emailing each other with a link to their top ten, they simply 'tagged' their blog posts with 10blogs. This allowed all bloggers to visit Technorati and browse through the whole blogosphere's top 10 blogs!
Wow. DUH! How the hell did I miss that? I kind of feel like an idiot.
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Imagine if Google were to use del.icio.us tags as a way to refine search results? Imagine I said!
I very randomly ran across
this DM News article about adding context to search results and thought I'd share. (I was actually at a photo shoot and told to look busy, so I picked up the latest issue of DM News that happened to be sitting there and turned to this article.) The article suggests that search engines should add some additional bit of context to results to help users find what they're looking for faster. What kind of context you ask?
Well, Glenn Barnett, the article's author was kind enough to answer:
What is navigational context? Navigational context, also known as faceted browsing, enhances the search process by letting users provide additional information to a search input. Consider two cases in which a user is searching for shoes. In the first case, the user enters the term “Nike� in a search box. In the second, the user sees an area of the page marked “brand� with a set of hyperlinks for brands such as Adidas, Converse and Nike, and then clicks the link for Nike. In this second case, the application derives much more value from the input, as it knows not only what term the user wants to search for (i.e., Nike), but in which context to search for it (i.e., brand).
Now, tell me what that sounds like to you . . .
If you answered "tags," you win!
Back at the beginning of May I wrote this:
What if you added tags to search to add that kind of context that's missing? Say you search for "Java," then when you get your results on the right side of the page are tabs with the most popular tags for the pages you returned (minus the most popular, which would most likely be your search term). Say the top tag is "programming," followed by "language" and then "coffee" (I just totally made that up). Now, if you click one of those tabs you can filter the results to only see those pages with the term "java" and the tag "coffee." That means the results should be a lot more accurate.
Imagine if you will that
Google were to buy
del.icio.us. Wouldn't be that crazy, right? After all, "Google's mission
is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." [Italics are mine.] Now, every time you search Google it shows you your results with some refinement options based on the most popular tags associated with the group of results the search returns. Do you have your own del.icio.us account? Well, then it can make your searches more accurate by returning results based on your tagging patterns.
Yeah, it's far fetched, and Google probably isn't buying del.icio.us anytime soon. But it does kind of make sense, doesn't it?
Just an idea I had as I sat in the background of a photo shoot.
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Flickr tagging is designed as more of an annotation system, while del.icio.us tagging is designed as more of a filing system. But are the two sites moving towards a single tagging culture?
Over at
Plasticbag.org, Tom Coates has an interesting hypothesis on the
shift in tagging from a filing to an annotative process. Coates explains that tagging on
del.icio.us was designed as a filing process while tagging on
Flickr is much more of an annotative one.
While I agree with that argument, something occurred to me today that I found rather interesting. While posting to del.icio.us I thought realized that part of the reason it's tagging system is more closely related to a filing system is because of the importance placed on the "extended" input box. For me, that is where I annotate my bookmarks, meaning by the time I actually get to the tagging them, there is no real reason to use the tags as a secondary form of annotation. The fact that you can search extended fields in del.icio.us only increases their usefulness and power as an annotation tool.
When you compare this process to Flickr, I think something interesting emerges. On Flickr, you can place notes on a photo, however, this is not a primary activity. One look at the Flickr interface and you realize that adding a note to a photo is a secondary process, something that can only be done once the photo is uploaded and clicked on.
There's a difference in the user experience of tagging across the two sites that can't be denied. It's quite possible that people are beginning to use tags in a more Flickr-ized/annotating way on del.icio.us (as Coates suggests by the shift in the tag "blog" from "blogs," the singular being an annotation versus the plural being a category). However, I would tend to believe that we will continue to see a large difference in the way tags are used across both sites thanks to the interface design.
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Is tagging individual posts on a blog the next tagging trend? (Question 2: Am I going to write about "the next trend in tagging" every week?)
If you ask me,
Jonas Luster has come up with the killer tagging app for blogs.
tags4WP is a
WordPress plugin that he's created to allow users to tag a blog entry. Essentially (as I understand it) what it does it change the way WordPress handles categories to allow people to create and categorize in the way one might tag something.
I've thought about this idea before and while I maintain that I'm not sure how successful this idea will be, I think it looks like the best offering out there for bringing tags to the mainstream.
The problem I have with it remains that I understand tagging as something done for personal gain. I tag del.icio.us posts so they're easier to find later, it's all about me. I use the tags that make the most sense in my own head. So why then would I tag a blog? In most cases, I don't think I would. However, as I was giving it more thought, I realized I could imagine tagging articles somewhere like the New York Times. That's because on a large site like that, with many users, if I believed that others would tag articles and that those tags might add value to my experience I would tag articles. I would add to that community.
That's when it dawned on me, what's the difference between my blog and the New York Times (no jokes . . . please). Seriously, other than the quality of writing (NYT over me) and visitors (again, NYT wins), what's the difference? They're both just web sites that include writings on different topics. Yet because the NYT has a massive amount of visitors I understand it as more of a community. But why? In reality, this is much more of a community to me than the New York Times site could ever be. Lots of friends and family read this site, people I have known for some time. If that's not a community, what is?
I don't know that I have answers to all these questions, especially whether tagging makes sense in this context. I still suspect not, but I say it's worth a try. All I've got to do is build the MT plugin.
So tell me, would you tag this post if you could? If so, what would you tag it with?
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A look at Feedster's "Tag This"
Scott Rafer and the
Feedster crew are at it again. This time they've come up with a way to add a form to any post that allows any user to tag an individual entry. It looks just like this:
After trying the code on the page multiple times I can not get it to work. Here is what I'm using:
<form name="tags" method="get" action="http://bookmarks.feedster.com/submit.php">
<input type="text" name="tags" size="15">
<input type="hidden" name="uri" value="<$MTEntryPermalink valid_html="1"$>">
</script>
<input type="submit" value="Tag this">
</form>
Not sure what's going on, but I'll continue as if it works (since I already wrote it).
In fact, that is it. It's an interesting idea and one I discussed with Scott at some length. I love the idea of allowing anyone to tag a post, because, as Scott wrote in this post introducing "Tag This," "not all his readers have or want delicious accounts or want to learn enough to create them, though the benefits of a full social bookmarking account are numerous." While I agree with that, and think there are many advantages to allowing users to tag anonymously, there are still a outstanding issues.
First, for me at least (and I've mentioned this to Scott), I really would like a way to dynamically display the tags users have given to my entry. This doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to implement and I expect we'll be seeing it sometime down the road.
However, even that function doesn't answer a bigger question for me: Will readers tag a post when it has no real advantage for them? I tag things on del.icio.us because it will be easier for me to find them later. They are my bookmarks and I use tags that make the most sense to me. However, when you take tagging out of that context, what value does a user get out of it? (Please, someone reading this correct me if I'm wrong.)
I just feel like if I go to a page and am able to tag it, I probably won't unless I want an easy way to find it again and in that case, I'll just use del.icio.us. Now I know this service isn't necessarily designed for me, but who will want to use it?
I guess the bottom line for me is that tagging is only useful when I can see a direct benefit. Call me selfish, but I'm not really going to tag someone else's post to help them create a better organization system. I can see how something like "Tag This" can work on a larger scale, say for a website like the New York Times, where the benefit of tagging an article is the belief that someone else will be doing the same and creating a better organized site. But I don't get it on a small scale. This may be my shortsightedness, though, because I do see the irony in saying that this will work on a site with a large, community-like readership but not a smaller site like mine (therefore implying that I don't have a community-like readership).
If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. What else can I say?
Update (6/12/05): Looks like I got it working with a little help from the Feedster crew, here it is
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I just got finished reading Clay Shirky's new piece on tagging titled,
"Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags". It's a good piece, not groundbreaking I didn't think, but worth the read if you have some time to get through the 15-plus pages. One quote that really jumped out at me from the article is about the reliance on physical constraints behind categorization methods. Shirky writes, "The essence of a book isn't the ideas it contains. The essence of a book is "book." Thinking that library catalogs exist to organize concepts confuses the container for the thing contained."
Books contain ideas. Libraries contain books. Libraries organize books by ideas because it made the most sense to them. You can't expect people to know titles, but you can expect them to have a general idea of the subject of the book they're looking for. The problem is that most books contain more than one idea.
Shirky continues:
It isn't the ideas in a book that have to be in one place -- a book can be about several things at once. It is the book itself, the physical fact of the bound object, that has to be one place, and if it's one place, it can't also be in another place. And this in turn means that a book has to be declared to be aboutß some main thing. A book which is equally about two things breaks the 'be in one place' requirement, so each book needs to be declared to about one thing more than others, regardless of its actual contents.
This is simply not true online. We're not locked down by space constraints. That's what
the long tail's all about, folks. So why do we continue to organize things in that way?
Well . . . because that's how we know how. That's what we're comfortable with. It's easy to throw a category option into Movable Type to provide people with a second way to allow users to browse their content. Problem is, it doesn't really make all that much sense in this context. What I mean is, the same lack of physical constraints that allow us to use other categorization methods also makes traditional categorization methods make very little sense.
The web has no boundaries. It's not limited to square footage or shelf space. Therefore, if you were to use a traditional categorization scheme it would be essentially useless. If you were looking for US History online and you just got a long list of web sites organized alphabetically that were "about" US History you'd be lost in a sea of clicks. So instead we use search engines to find specific words within those pages that relate to our interest.
Now it's finally time to return to blogs. Why then do we use categories as a way to organize blogs? We've moved away from it in other places (even moving toward user-tagging in the most forward thinking web apps), however, it seems that blogging software is stuck in the past.
Why can't we come up with a more imaginative solution to our blog organization needs than simply slapping on a category label and being done with it? Most things I write about can't be categorized by one word or term. In fact, I don't think you could categorize this site with one word or term. But MT doesn't offer a user-friendly way to add multiple category labels (yes I know it's possible . . . I said user-friendly). It also doesn't offer a way to allow users to categorize content themselves.
At first as I was reading this I thought that maybe that was a good idea, but then on second thought, there's no value to a user tagging a post on my website unless they plan on revisiting it and want an easy way to find it. So I am stuck.
This really boils down to how to organize the archives on my redesign (or whether to include an archive at all). Are they useful or is it us being stuck in an old paradigm? I'm offering easy search access on every page, so do you need to browse by date and category too?
I think the final decision I've had is this: The archive page will consist of two columns. The left will allow you to browse by date. The right, will offer you three options, three "r"'s in fact (not those three). They will be "random entry," "recent entries" and "recommended reading." So you will either be able to browse by date, let your luck decide and read a random entry, check out what five entries I've written most recently (though I'm not sure this is useful) or allow me to guide you through some of the entries I suggest you read.
Does this make sense? Does it need anything else? I'm sorry to keep talking about this stupid redesign, but I'm having a blast thinking through every step of the user experience and trying to design a blog without adhering to the standards that have been set up by our forebloggers.
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Today I was reading a
Seattle Times article about search and I ran across this quote:
See how long it takes to find the top five university marine-biology programs, or the store with the cheapest tires in Seattle. You searched for java, but did you mean coffee, the island or the programming language?
Nothing revolutionary, but it got me thinking. What if you added tags to search to add that kind of context that's missing? Say you search for "Java," then when you get your results on the right side of the page are tabs with the most popular tags for the pages you returned (minus the most popular, which would most likely be your search term). Say the top tag is "programming," followed by "language" and then "coffee" (I just totally made that up). Now, if you click one of those tabs you can filter the results to only see those pages with the term "java" and the tag "coffee." That means the results should be a lot more accurate.
I'm sure someone has come up with this, but when I thought of it this morning I felt pretty smart. Thoughts?
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Today seems to be tag day. Now it's time to answer an essential question of tagging: Are tags really useful? The question was brought up by
Tim Bray (which I found via
Alex Wright). Bray wrote:
Are tags useful? Are there any questions you want to ask, or jobs you want to do, where tags are part of the solution, and clearly work better than old-fashioned search? I really want to believe that tagging is big, a game-changer, but the longer I go on asking this question and not getting an answer, the more nervous I get.
This gets back to the individual vs. social thing. Undoubtedly tags are useful for individuals organizing information for their own retrieval. They've already proven their usefulness as a way to organize bookmarks on
del.icio.us. I think the question is whether this usefulness extends to the group. Specifically, is tagging blog posts the best way to organize them?
This I'm not so sure about. First off, as Scott Rafer points out, this can lead to spam. But even more than that, is tagging the best way for me to find the information from blog posts? Isn't using a PubSub or Feedster feed with specific keywords even more efficient? Yes, you'll run into some information you're not necessarily looking for, but for retrieving other people's content search seems like a much easier way. Why is this? Why don't I think tags extend as well to blogging?
I'm not completely sure, but let me take a shot. First, I don't tag my posts because I never remember to. It's not built into the interface with the same simplicity as del.icio.us. Second, I would expect that people are much more specific when they're tagging others work versus their own. It's easier to boil someone else's writing down to a few select tags than it is your own. It's only human to want to think that you've covered lots of areas and thus deserve lots of tags. As Scott reminded me, essentially tags are a way to annotate content to make it easy to find later. Using that definition, why would you annotate your own content? What's more, since you wrote it, aren't you likely to remember specific language you may have used? I often find myself searching my site for something I've written and it's almost always quite easy to find. I am pretty good at wording searches in my own words when I'm searching for my own words.
I guess what I'm saying is that I think people (or at least me) use tags first to help themselves. When you're tagging your own content, it's less useful to you and more useful to the group. It's nice to believe people would think of the group first, but they don't. Also, I'm not sure tagging with the group in mind makes for the best organization anyway. As I mentioned in my last post, the more specific I am with my tagging, the more likely it's useful to someone looking for information under that tag or combination of tags.
So, in conclusion, my answer is that tagging is really useful with some caveats.
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Are tags an individual or a social thing?
This is the question that Arienna of Blogaholics and I have been going back and forth on in the comments of my "Annotating Flickr with a Side of Social Networking" post. For me, tagging is an individual activity. When I tag something in del.icio.us, most of the time it's with little or no thought to who else is going to see that tag. I tag things so that when I go back and want to find them I can as easily as possible. Arienna, on the other hand, sees things a little differently. In the comments she explains:
I think that tagging is social, not individualistic.
Although you can tag for your own personal reference - like having a well organized database of stuff you are interested in, be it yours or others. However, I think that we tag because we want to share. The more tags we associate with a post, a picture, or a bookmark in del.icio.us, the more people are likely to find and benefit from our effort. The same is said when others tag a photo on Flickr - they are talking to you about what they think of your picture and are expressing their opinion to others who may search that term.
Her comment got me thinking about the evolution of tagging online. While I'm not sure just what that evolution is like, I do think looking at the way my tagging practices have evolved probably sheds some light.
With del.icio.us, I started with a very limited number of tags because I was worried things would get too confusing. I didn't want to muddle up my system (or the system), so I tried to pack lots of things into little containers. Slowly, though, as I realized that this was all about me finding information I'm interested in faster and more easily, I began to expand my tags. At this point I have a whole lot of tags (I don't feel like counting, but I would guess it's in the hundreds). Then from tagging things openly, I started doing more social things, like the "needsafeed"
tag, which allows people across the internet to contribute to a list of websites that need an RSS feed. It's kind of interesting to see how my use evolved, because I started with the group in mind when I kept my tags as clean and simple as possible and then moved to tagging things differently when they were for me individually and socially. But the best thing about tagging is that it's easy to do both.
I think this is what makes it so powerful. To me it has the ability to be both an individual and a social activity. I can't imagine ever going back to worrying about the group when I'm tagging things personally, but on the other hand, I also love using tags as a way to connect with other people (check out my WhatsInYourFirefox post).
Also, it's important to remember that the more individually you use tags the more effective they are for the group. If I use five very specific tags to describe something then someone who may have subscribed to that intersection of five tags is sure to find it interesting.
Essentially, the big point is that the power of tags lies in their flexibility. To quote an old favorite, "the medium is the message" (that's McLuhan by the way). Tags can do or be anything a user wants them to. It's the ultimate innovation tool because it's infinitely expandable.
I read a great article in the Times yesterday titled "Innovation Moves From the Laboratory to the Bike Trail and the Kitchen". It was all about how the most innovation comes from "lead users" (aka early adopters). The gist of it is that when you give someone a product, they will find their ways to use it. Often, they'll come up with entirely new products that you may not have imagine, but that other users will desire. It even includes some numbers from 3M:
In a study at 3M, he and several colleagues found that product ideas from lead users generated eight times the sales of ideas generated internally - $146 million versus $18 million a year - in part because lead users were more likely to come up with ideas for entire new product lines rather than minor improvements.
This is an incredible idea. Thanks to technology, the definition of R&D is changing. Joe Schmo in his basement has so much reach that he can come up with ideas today that he never would have imagined 15 years ago. He can also connect with other users in entirely new ways.
It just goes to show you that the more access to customize you give a user, the more it can benefit your company. Tagging is infinitely customizable (literally), so imagine what people can come up with. The sky's the limit.
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