A Number of Responses on Tagging and Search

I have been been getting some very useful responses to my posts on tagging. In this post I want to list a few of them for easy reference and briefly record my follow up to their links. Here they are listed in no particular order.

Steve Eisner, VP of Engineering at AskMe Corporation, writes the blog, A Social Life. He recently wrote about Tagging vs. Searching in which he wrote, “A lot of people (myself included) have tended to more or less equate tagging with “del.icio.us”. Delicious doesn’t search well, and google doesn’t tag well. That creates some kind of artificial distinction between “tagging” and “searching”. As a result, people get distracted trying to demonstrate the (re-)findability value of social software (perhaps because search is so generally useful that impact on search has become the easiest measurement of value?).” and more.

Stephanie Lemieux documented a discussion on The Value of Social Tagging in a Corporate Setting in the Taxonomy Community of Practice wiki. Among other things she related a dialogue around Raytheon’s internal tagging efforts so here is another example of tagging behind the firewall to go with IBM and Mitre.

John Lemke aka Lumpy shared this Slacker Manger Article, The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users, which looks great. He said that he found himself searching much, much less after reading it and found himself learning much more as well. He wrote this post on the topic, Delicious vs. Search, in which eh said that tagging is not a replacement for search but it is an alternative. Lumpy shared this in his comments on this blog, “Search, Knowledge Management and tagging are related but each one is very different. I don't think tagging will replace search but I feel it fits into the concept of knowledge management much better than search.” I agree with this point. Here is an interesting post he wrote on one of his blogs on the topic, Tagaholics Unite! — More on the joy and chaos of tagging. There are a lot of useful links in it.

Andy Havens added a very long comment in which he concluded, “I'm not saying tagging is the "death of search," but I've found that once you start using del.iciou.us and get used to the quirks and personality issues that come with referring to how *people* rank and judge sites rather than how a machine does it... you get not just better results, but deeper and more interesting and fun results. It's especially interesting to go through the tags of one user once you've found a really spot-on site from them. It's like finding a lost friend and then picking his pockets for notes.”

I agree with what Andy wrote but I would still use Google for quick searches and del.icio.us when I have the time to explore a topic in depth and see what others are reading on it. enterprise tagging

Comments

[Lumpy]

Thanks for the kind words!

I have been pretty busy due to personal reasons but I have put up a few more posts on tagging. One is a specific example of how I use delicious to auto-publish a good portion of radiostatic.am

http://lumpyscorner.com/TidBits/?p=30

and another is how I use the script and "tag math" to sort through tags.

http://lumpyscorner.com/TidBits/?p=32

Most important, thanks for the comments and e-mails (not just Bill alone, others have surfed over from here). The learning aspect of tagging is the most exciting part. Web Conversations add to the benfit.