Tagging is Fabulous! Tagging is Crap!

That was the name of the session for this Thursday's Bloggers Meeting at the Berkman Center.  The moderator was Shimon Rura

 

The session begain with an overview of some of the familiar services that are using tagging.    There was also a look at the differences between spurl, furl, and delicious in terms of clusters, related tags, bookmarking widgets, private tags, etc. 

Fabulous:
Tagging allows you to categorize information without being forced to use a pre-determined vocabulary and allows other to easily contribute content
User has control to select a "tag" or  "name" that is meaningful to the user
The social processes of tagging - the way the name becomes useful to the group  and is one of the benefits
Tagging from the point of view of taggers.  If you wanted to sell this inside a corporation, show the tag stream for the tag taxonomy.   Experts in taxomony  find great urls.   The stream of interesting knowledge that comes out of it … 

Tagging will probably bring back standard taxonomists and make work for taxonomists.  You won't see people holding signs that say "I'll tag for food."
"Internal delicious" would be very useful (earch person on staff has their tagged bookmarks and you could easiliy access it)

Crap:
The tag London could mean the city of London, Julie London, or Jack London
No conventions have sprung up around tags, although it would be useful for places names so you know whether the tag "Watertown" refers to "Watertown, NY" or "Watertown, MA"

misc. notes:
The founder of delicious didn't want to use "popular tags."  Main reason is  if the tag are going to be useful to YOU -  the tag should express your way of thinking not the majority.   However, the benefit to exposing the popular terms is that a  taxonomy emerges from the bottom up.  A great example of a folksonomy is ebay - where a laptop is a notebook.

Some tools:
A tool I hadn't seen was Zniff.com which is a search engine based on spurl tags - lets you do a search on the content of web pages.
Shimon showed frassle.net

Technorati Tag: nptech

Update:  While researching for context on another topic, I came across David Weinberger's notes from a Berkman session called "Why Tagging Matters."

 

Comments

[Beth]

Note to self:

See Ed Batista's personal blog entry:
http://www.vivabatista.com/2005/05/technorati_and_.html
for a tutorial on using technorati.