Tim Bray asked recently: “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.”
Allow me to allay your nerves, sir. Here is a great example of useful tag i found today, and its not even a tag, although it easily could be one. Allow me to explain. I was wandering through the blosphere earlier today when i came across an intriguing resource. It’s called Circulation Dropping. This is a blog, and therefore an automated feed, that does nothing much but track the erosion of subscribers in the paper-based economy. What a useful resource for folks trying to understand the intersect of paper and digital-based media, if they pub and sub with the tag. But what formal classification would such a resource fall under? What kind of insano query would turn up this useful ammunition? How much would i have to pay IBM for a webFountain query? Where could i go to find it? Who could i ask for this data? No single research company would be likely to do this aggregation. A consultant might, but they would charge a lot for a custom job. In a tagworld we can potentially avoid the expense.
My point is certainly not to attack formal taxonomy and classification. Librarians are extraordinarily productive searchers primarily because of such classifications. Documentation with classification can also be quite hellish. I really don’t think this its an either or question. But i will argue with anyone that tells me tagsonomy or folskonomy isn’t a valuable adjunct to traditional classifications.
But wait – when you consider documentation you can see an area where tags could come into their own. Because they are metadata, data about the data, they can provide a filter, just another schema, an additional classification, for a data set. Tags provide a navigation mechanism.
Thanks to Greg Linden for reminding me to make this post when i saw him echo tim. I didn’t know Greg before but he has been tagged as smart by Stephen (he’s on the Tecosystems blogroll). Ah what’s that, an example of tags-based emergence, a la Sifry? It’s heading that way.
The combo of lighweight feeds and end-user defined tags is so darned wonderful. Another use case: ego surfing is a killer app in this respect. Technorati and pubsub have really changed what it means to listen to the market. Now any PR department should be tracking themselves in this way, without needing to pay another agency a ton of money for the privilege. Press cuttings services-do they really do a good job? That’s a whole aggegator community getting disintermediated.
I have riffed on this whole future of market research idea before, so i thought i would just call it out again. Tags, attestation, and community-based metadata. The BBC is going to show the world just how useful tags are – how else can the organization get the 2oth back archive ready for a digital rights future? By enlisting gardeners – that’s the public, and give them something for free (we already paid for it actually)–that’s the national archive of TV and Radio.
I would even argue the fact you can instrument your web site to track browser market share is a good pointer to the potential value of tags. I can then tag that feed, and so on. Danny Sullivan disagrees (extensively) with tag utility, but I would argue he may be fighting a corner, rather than looking to resolve a tension. Or maybe he just finds the hype exhausting.
I know tags are useful because i use them every day. I am more productive, and thankful for it. The most important reason tags are so useful may be that tags are just fun; people do it without a stick. Go play with flickr for a few hours folks, if you dont think semantics emerge from communities of interest. We like putting things in categories; its what we do. People discriminate and categorize. We just don’t like other people telling us what categories to use (back to documentation again!). Tags are about contributing something. Tags are about architectures of participation. We’re entering the Participation Age and tags will be a huge part of it. Why not go with the flow?
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