Next Generation Tagging
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