If you are know something about tags there is no need to read this post, unless you want to build on what I am writing. Pito Salas recently gave me a useful general introduction on tags. He also explained how BlogBridge can be used for tags which I will cover tomorrow. Tags are the “wild west” of classification. Anyone can tag anything anyway they want. There is no agreement upon or imposed taxonomy.
This total freedom has classification purists upset or dismissing it as chaos which will collapse on its own expanding weight. Initially, it is likely to be a bit chaotic for each topic, but then standards and common terms start to emerge as more people use the more popular terms. This creates a “bottom up” fluid taxonomy rather than an imposed one. This fluidity allows for the constantly changing way we look at things to emerge which I see as largely a good thing.
This total freedom also lowers the barrier to use. I was even able to do it. At this point the total freedom also allows for tag spam with the bad guys tagging their stuff anyway they want to show up on popular tags.
Del.icio.us has been the prime mover on making tags popular and accessible. It is easy to register and follow the trends in tagging. You can see a constantly update stream of urls for blog posts or other Web items that are getting tagged, what the tag is and how many people tagged it this way. It could be as few as one or, like one example we saw, 2675. In this case that means that 2675 people thought this url was important enough to tag and agreed on the term. Clicking on the number of taggers takes you to the listing by day of the tagging. You also find the other tags used for the same url, as you can put more than one tag on a url and people frequently do this. Clicking on one of these other tags takes you to a constantly updated list of everything tagged with this new term and so on. So you can see there are endless possibilities for exploring and tracking themes in the Web and for spending a lot of time doing it.
Connotea is the free academic version of del.icio.us. As their site says: “Connotea helps you store your reference lists online, which means that it's readily accessible, it's linked directly into the literature and it's easily shared with your colleagues. Opening your references to other researchers enables you to discover new leads by connecting to the collections of those with similar interests to you.” This also assumes the academics want to share their content, which many, but not all, do.
If you are interested, go to del.icio.us and register and try it out. Tomorrow, I will discuss how BlogBridge can make the tagging experience easier for both del.icio.us and Connotea.
This article about Tagging made me think about how similar to methods used by usability specialists and information architects when creating a hierarchical structure and categories for websites. Can include: card sorting and card sorting a definitive guide, free-listing, and affinity diagramming.
These methods explore how people group info/web pages so that you can develop structures that should make sense to most users and increase the probabilty of people being able to find things.
Here's a few links if anyone's interested:
http://www.infodesign.com.au/usabilityresources/design/cardsorting.asp
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/card_sorting_a_definitive_guide
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/beyond_cardsorting_free_listing_methods_to_explore_user_categorizations
http://www.usabilitynet.org/tools/affinity.htm
Posted by: Freyja | January 17, 2006 at 04:45 AM