from a post by Steve Eisner who writes a blog called A Social Life
Some points for me:
- Defines two different types of tag behavior: Consuming Taggers: People who stalk other people's tags. Prefer to use their own vocabularly. Publishing Taggers: Haven an incentive to match their audiences' vocabularies.
"At the same time, the network benefits of social bookmarking depend on enough publishers agreeing upon a common vocabulary. Although these forces are somewhat in opposition, things work out pretty well for most topics. Equilibrium is quickly reached as everyone agrees on a few common tags."
Tag mess happens when the topic is complex, new, or very specific. Tag-based solutions break down and everyone starts speaking their own language. Confusion results in a huge variations of tags. (Example here)
How to clean up the mess::
- Gather usage data and calculate tag values
- Expose tag values to publishers
- Provide new ways to browse tags
- Indirectly associate user-specific tags to high-value public tags
Getting past the tag mess (and making tagging palatable to a more controlled enterprise environment) starts with the recognition that for any particular piece of content, not every tag has the same value. If you want to encourage a certain subset of tags, expose tag values to publishers. Their natural desire to reach an audience means that they will gravitate towards the most valuable tags. But this doesn’t just mean showing a tagger the previous tags that people have used. Assuming “value” is based on whether this tag will help your audience find this content, then the tags that people are already searching for must be worth much more – even if fewer people are currently using those tags.
Other solution:
Tag Equivalence: What this means is that users can tag items with some original term, but if another term becomes more popular, the first term can somehow be declared equivalent to the new term, so searchers will find the intended content. Whether automatically applied or added manually, this equivalence can greatly increase the network benefit of a bookmarking application.
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