Here's an example of "social search" in action ... both Nancy White (via the for: option in delicious) and Michele Martin (via email) sent me the link to the recent Pew Internet report on tagging. I'm summarizing the parts I found interesting:
The give us some numbers of tagging, although since it is the first time they have asked about tagging there is not data to determine whether tagging is increasing or not.
A December 2006 survey has found the at 28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorize online content.
The report also includes an interview with David Weinberger who on his blog wonders how many taggers it takes for tagging to become a vital web resources?
Even if just 1% of Web users tagged resources with some regularity, they would be creating handholds for the other 99%. That 1% will add a layer of meaning (or "semantics," if you prefer the way that sounds) that will seed enough innovation and connectedness of ideas—and thus of people—that we'll have to go straight from Web 2.0 to Web 4.0. (Web 3.0 is about the Web getting "lemony-scented," so it's just as well that we're skipping it.)
The reports gives us a demographic snap shot of who is tagging now ("Classic early adopters, people under 40" - guess I'm not a classic early adopter). The reports suggests that tagging is poised to go mainstream because of more and more sites, like Google and Yahoo, make it easier to tag. The report also shares some traffic data for the popular tagging sites, Flickr and Delicious.
The meat of the report is an interview with David Weinberger on why Tagging Matters.David Weinberger has thought through the many ways tagging changes people’s relationship to information and each other.
His reasons why tagging matters:
First, tagging lets us organize the vastness of the Web -- and even our email, as Gmail has
shown -- using the categories that matter to us as individuals. You may want to tag, say, a
Stephen King story as “horror,” but maybe to me it's “ghost story” and to a literature professor it's
“pop culture.” Tagging lets us organize the Net our way.
Second, Tagging also allows social groups to form around similarities of interests and points of view. If you're using the same tags as I do, we probably share some deep commonalities. And, by looking over the public field of tags, we can see which tags are most frequently used and how they relate. Those patterns are called “folksonomies” -- it's a play on the word “taxonomies.” Folksonomies reveal how the public is making sense of things, not just how expert cataloguers think we ought to be thinking.
He also describes how the act of tagging isn't purely selfish
There's an altruistic appeal to tagging as well. Tagging at public sites can give you a sense that
you're adding to a shared stream of knowledge. At del.icio.us, or other such sites, tag a page
“robotics” and you know that it's automatically added to the list of pages tagged that way, so
anyone else interested in that topic can find it.
He acknowledges the problems with tagging, as we've heard elsewhere.
Tags work because they're so simple, but because they're so simple, they can be ambiguous. So, if you need to find everything about a topic, you often can't rely on tags.
More broadly, some worry that folksonomies can be a type of “tyranny of the majority,” in which the prevalent group's way of thinking about the world overwhelms the local and the quirky. That's something to watch out for, but by analyzing tag sets we can also build a tag thesaurus that knows that the tag “roman” may be equivalent to the tag “novel” in some circumstances.
Hmm ..how is a tag thesaurus different a taxonomy?
When asked about the future of tagging, he points to wider adoption and creative ways for harvesting tagging. He gives an example:
Flickr is about cluster photographs by subject with impressive accuracy just by analyzing their tags, so that photos of Gerald Ford are separated from photos of Ford Motor cars. We'll also undoubtedly figure out how to intersect tags with social networks, so that the tags created by people we know and respect have more “weight” when we search for tagged items. In fact, by analyzing how various social groups use tags, we can do better at understanding how seemingly different worldviews map to one another.
This is interesting to me because of the analysis of the NPTECH tag.
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