I completely agree with you that tagging is selfish. However, by getting lots of people to pursue their own self interest, we can create some very powerful new discovery engines.

For example, I tag all of my bookmarks too. However, I use http://www.blinklist.com. Tagging my bookmarks is fantastic because it makes finding and accessing them that much faster. However, BlinkList also works great for discovery. I can directly connect to my friends and see what they have been up to. I can also use BlinkList as a “Personal Discover Engine.” This is where the wisdom of crowds comes in. By aggregating the collective knowledge, I can find the newest, hottest, or most popular sites. For example the best web 2.0 blogs here http://www.blinklist.com/tag/web%202.0%20blogs/

What problems are we solving with BlinkList?

We are attempting to solve some very big problems. 1) With more and more information on the Inernet, how do you find the most relevant and interesting content? How do you find what is hot, fresh, in a digital world with millions of bloggers, websites, etc.? Google is great for doing research but if you want to find the best info about web 2.0? Where do you go? What do you do?

On BlinkList, you could go here:
http://www.blinklist.com/tag/web%202.0%20watchlist/

I think that a people powered discovery engine might help solve this problem because you can connect, share, and discover information from friends and like minded people. Ok, granted we are just at the very beginning of this and will have to make huge improvements to our platform over time. However, I believe that we might be able to help solve this problem.

Mike

Comment by Mike — October 16, 2005 @ 10:58 am

“There are much better ways to use the possibilities that folksonomies offer”

care to expand?

Comment by Phil Wilson — October 16, 2005 @ 11:46 am

“Allow me to explain: when you tag something in del.icio.us, you’re doing it for yourself and not others. ”

Unless I am something missing (and I be glad to hear about that) with delicious I do tag for others. Because even if I only tag it in terms of my own way of tagging, in general most of the people tag the same way.

So the users have a value of it: they tag it so they can find it and others can discover it too.

And this is also the problem: I only recently started delicious and while I really like the way I can add things, I will stop using it. Because I don’t want to world to see my very obvious tag “to read” and “to post” and also not the category I am posting it into, because it is easily spotable what I’d be working on.

For myself, I would be tagging differently, like I would do for the public. An example: I am not native to english, so my notes do have a tendency to be mixed. Totally understandable for me but if I would tag something for the public also, I would try to come up with ‘good’ words.

Meaning: Not say howtos but howto, because I can see that others prefer it that way. And maybe add some tags from the given list because they fit and could help others to find stuff.

Comment by Nicole Simon — October 16, 2005 @ 12:18 pm

As far as I can tell, there are only two differences between tagging and categorisation.

1. You can assign multiple tags but not multiple categories. I don’t understand this. “Categorisation”, to me, has *never* implied that only one category is possible. I call that “filing”. Multiple categories seem to do away with all the criticism I see for categories.

2. Hierarchy. You can’t put one tag within another. The workaround of using multiple tags to emulate this is lossy, so, for example, you have no way of distinguishing between myfirstcompany/clients/mysecondcompany and mysecondcompany/clients/myfirstcompany.

It seems to me that once you do away with the misconception that categorisation is restricted to placing items in one and only one category, “tagging” is just a crippled version of categorisation.

Comment by Jim — October 16, 2005 @ 12:19 pm

Jim: I think that depends on what you are tagging/categorizing. There is useful is hierarchy for some things, like your business example. The usefulness of hierarchy is not there for less important and less structured information.

Comment by Daniel — October 16, 2005 @ 1:42 pm

Hmm, yes, but where hierarchy is not useful, you simply don’t use it. In that case it’s indistinguishable from tagging, and so the conclusion is that, in any situation, categories are *at least* as good as tagging, and sometimes better.

PS: comment submission is broken with a blank Referer header.

Comment by Jim — October 16, 2005 @ 3:18 pm

Re referer: It’s a clever way to fight most comment spam, because bots spam wp-comments without hitting any page first. If it starts breaking commenting for users too, I’ll roll back the functionality. But for now, I’ve done that on purpose.

On tagging vs categorization:

If you have categorization as the act of selecting related terms that can be in a hierarchy or not, you may infer that categories are just as useful as tags.

I see it in another way, though. I see tags as keywords that don’t need to be in a previously existant list. Categorization schemes usually do not allow you to flexibly create or remove terms, because the point of it is to abide to a previous hierarchy - as you said, correctly, yourself.

So this loose method of tagging an object independently of whatever pre-existant keyword lists is what gives tagging the edge over categories. And this is because with techniques like clustering or bayesian filtering, you can suggest terms and allow the user to make the final decision.

If categories were used in this loose, hierarchy free way, I would imply that they were the same thing, but the implementations of categorization in the software out now prove otherwise.

Comment by Fred — October 16, 2005 @ 6:19 pm

As I understand it, categorizations have to be extensive and predefined, as part of being categorical. Tags on the other hand can and often are instant, because their meaning is not so strongly defined by exclusion, of not being the other. Point is, categories and tags are not different only because of the way they are cmmnly used, but because they are (unlike Jim suggests) two ontologically different systems altogether.

Comment by Jere — October 16, 2005 @ 7:40 pm

[...] Tagging and social bookmarks (tags: tagging del.icio.us) [...]

Pingback by teknokool.net » links for 2005-10-16 — October 16, 2005 @ 11:55 pm

The thing that I’m finding intriguing about tagging is that, as Frederico notes at the beginning, we humans exhibit an innate capacity for assigning semantic associations. “Look, it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s super meme!” It’s easy and sometimes even fun. I never agonize when assigning a tag or tags and I am rewarded each time I go to del.icio.us and call up a list of all the sites i’ve tagged with “p2p” or “wiki” or “chocolate.” I’m fairly certain that I wouldn’t use the service if I had to look up a dictated list of terms and agonize over which category or categories to assign. And so while the latter system might well be less ambiguous, it would be useless to me.

Also, the sheer numbers of people using tags on del.icio.us, Flickr, and their own blogs suggests that the mechanism scales well. People seem to not only not mind that the system comes with little synonym control, they seem to like the clustering and serendipity that comes with taking tangents and exploring terms used by others. It is unlikely that tagging will replace hierarchical taxonomies, but there is no reason the two can’t coexist. At least I certainly hope this is true. I prefer the Yellow Pages to be hierarchical, but without tagging, I wouldn’t have discovered a good many of the new ideas, books, music and websites that are informing how I think about the world. Long live tags, I say.

Comment by Suzanne — October 17, 2005 @ 6:16 am

[...] Fred Oliveira writes about Tagging, with a focus on why people tag. I hope he’ll still be in the bay area for Tag Camp on October 28 to share his ideas with that group. [...]

Pingback by TechCrunch » Web 2.0 This Week (October 9-15) — October 17, 2005 @ 8:15 am

I’ve been thinking on and around the idea of using social bookmarks in an educational context (e.g. http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/004404.html, or search for “bookmarks” on that site).

The institution I work for produces distance education materials. Where these are delivered in print, a print run might have to last for three or four years. Even for online courses, the majority of the content delivered as course material may remain unchanged for several years.

I have the feeling that getting students to tag electronic resources with course codes, references to study weeks, course themes, etc. may lead to positive benefits in several areas. For example, providing links to ‘related items’ (even if students are just acting as a filter and providing academics with a pre-filtered list of potentially useful resources), or identifyung areas where students feel they need more support (lots of bookmarks to a particular topic tagged with ‘tutorial’, for example).

With the increasingly large amounts of information available on the web, it can be a long and painful task identifying useful resources. Also, it happens on occasion that the students’ and instructors’ ideas of what is useful do not tally… Social bookmarking systems in part enable students to 1) share resources in some sort of learning community; and 2) reveal student identified resources to instructors; 3) share links with students on courses at other institutions in similar areas.

As to the importance of tagging - formally identified tags provide (e.g. a course code, or course level) a form a useful metadata. Asking students to log electronic resources into a University database and complete the requested metadata forms is unlikely to be successful. Asking them to tag relevent items in a social bookmarking system is more likely to succeed (or not!).

Providing students with course specific bookmarks that automatically add a course code tag, or an interface that trivially (and almost invisibly) allows students to tag a resource with appropriate tag-metadata, is even more likely ro result in usefully marked up resources.

Comment by Tony H — October 17, 2005 @ 10:17 am

A related issue, which you touch on in the volatility of the object being tagged, is the observation that the tags themselves seem more time specific than categories.
While looking back on some of the sites/ articles I added to del.icio.us in the early days, in some cases, I would tag them completely differently now. This is in part due to the constant evolutionary effect at work on the nomenclature and terminology used in the environment that prompts me to choose specific tags and in part due to my own knowledge base and interests changing over time. Categories and subcategories, on the other hand, will change in a stepwise manner as and when they get reviewed by the guiding hand. Therefore categories may avoid the pitfalls of using a briefly popular term and an understanding how the categories are put together may enable you to get to the resource more quickly than through simply using tags.

Suggested or guided tagging may be an effective way around this. But I have always wondered whether the use of suggested tags in del.icio.us just propagates a version of groupthink and how wide the range of tags were for a specific resource/ object before the addition of suggestions for tags. Subconsciously, or even consciously, the suggested tags prompt you to choose them rather than choose novel and possibly more publicly ‘valuable’ alternatives.
Using a small list of suggested tags from an external source - lecturer, event organizer - as has been suggested by Tony H, that try to guide the tagging may add more value in the long term. For example, tagging a page ‘Tagging101′ may help more people find it than the diverse group of tags that could be associated with it.

The beauty of tagging over categorization is it allows you to travel both paths at the same time - tag it Tagging101 for your course but also tag it for yourself using whatever system you know and understand.

Additionally, I agree that understanding the motivation behind the tagging is very important, a knowledge of ‘why’ the user is tagging may affect how much weight you attach to that user’s tags. Looking at Flickr, I have noticed that many pictures remain untagged but have a verbose description, while others are tagged to cover everything and it’s cousin to try and capture as wide an audience as possible for the picture. In between you have a number of pictures which are tagged for personal interest only (e.g. JohnSallyWedding).

I believe that navigating this “tag space” effectively requires a knowledge of the various aspects of tagging culture. This is normally learnt by trial and error but would it be better if people were taught to tag more effectively? Or is the beauty of tagging that they are a snapshot of a user’s motivation and thoughts at that specific time?

PS you seem to be missing a object in your second “I tag my” bullet points.

Comment by Eoin O — October 17, 2005 @ 12:07 pm

It’s been hard NOT to think about tags lately, huh? At any rate, I see this issue as somewhat of a behavioral continuum. Let’s consider two different people and their two different ways of “organizing their things.” On the one hand, we have the librarian with the clean desk – pencils sharpened, a real “everything-in-it’s-place” kinda person. She (well, I’ve never met a man librarian) is quite familiar with ISSN, ISBN, and she’s just nuts about the Dewey Decimal System. Her hobbies include coffee table books on taxonomy, organizing her neatly-folded t-shirts by color (R O Y G B V), and making sure everything on the coffee table lines up at 90º angles. Ok, you get the point, she’s a category kinda gal. One reason she’s motivated to use this system of categorization is it’s a standard, something bigger than her – it makes sense to conform to this methodology because many people can learn it, use it, contribute to it, and so forth.

On the other hand, we have a young gun – born and raised in an environment of 800 TV channels, e-mail, internet, radio, cell phones, etc. He basically lives in a bee-swarm of media from the time he wakes up to the time he falls asleep in from of the TV (with 4 remote controls lying on the floor). The thing is, it’s pretty normal for him, he hasn’t really “adapted” to these things like his parents. So, this dude is our tagger. He sees a site online he likes, he tags it with whatever he wants. Remember, he’s listening to music, the TV is on, his Mom is telling him to clean his room, and his mobile phone is ringing (the latest Nelly ringtone), so he’s being bombarded from all angles here. Tagging is a down and dirty way of organizing things. It’s true, we can carry over some of the more rigid formalities of categorization, but tags at its core is a Post-It note of sorts.

I’m well aware that our naughty librarian and punk rock Johnny couldn’t be more stereotypical, but the most important thing about this tags and categories thing is that people’s behaviors are scattered like crazy between the two extremes. Personally, I aim to be more like the librarian, but sometimes I lack the time or resources to make everything fit perfectly in a nice, clean row – so I tag! Maybe we shouldn’t be posing this as an “either - or” debate, perhaps people should be encouraged to “tag first, categorize later!” or just do both in any order?

In general, it’s safe to say that using computers everyday has made all of us a bit more neurotic than before. I noticed a few years ago that every time I reinstalled my operating system, I devised a “NEW & IMPROVED” file structure an nomenclature. And I did, although it’s always temporary – there’s always a better idea around the corner, things change. And I still haven’t figured out a satisfactory way of organizing my iTunes library in regards to Genre and country of origin (I like a lot of music from different countries). So for now, I have a ton of music in the “Brasil” genre that covers the gamut – from hip hop to punk rock, pagode to bossa nova, chorinho to pop.

That would be a prefect scenario for tags, right? So, Marcelo D2 would have these tags: brasil brazil “hip hop” rap samba “rap samba”(or whatever else you like). So, what if I ran a music store – one with bricks, mortar, and a street address – where would I put this CD? In the “World Music” section (damn, I always hated that nomenclature)? How about “Hip Hop”? See, we’re back to where we started.

This is a tough riddle we have before us, worthy of thought. I unfortunately don’t have a solution to offer, just this little bit of wordy commentary.

Comment by Brian — October 17, 2005 @ 4:10 pm

> when you tag something in del.icio.us, you’re doing it for yourself and not others.

There is a wide range of uses for tagging, and this statement is not strictly true for all uses. Some people tag for themselves, others for the general public, and others for a pre-arranged audience.

In some cases people use a pre-arranged tag to bring items to the attention of an interest group. The resulting community linkstream can be read by anyone, and is often syndicated on the group’s home page.
Marnie Webb will be at TagCamp later this month talking about community tagging.

There are also other tagging systems where the tagging audience is more public than private. H2O Playlists is a social bookmarking system from the Berkman Institute which is modeled after course syllabuses; it is geared toward people who want to publish a detailed collection of links, organized and annotated as a single published work.

NPTech
http://nptech.krazy.com/

H2O Playlists
http://h2obeta.law.harvard.edu

Berkman Institute
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu

I agree with the general observation, though, that the social value is a second order effect of lots of individual self-motivated tagging. Getting people to tag generally requires some sort of individual benefit in order to reach the critical mass where social benefit emerges. In the case of Delicious, it’s a convenient place to store your bookmarks, and so that individual tagging is the engine that powers the whole. Community linkstreams are such a small percentage of Delicious traffic that one could say they’re riding on the coattails of individual-motivated tagging.

Comment by Brian Del Vecchio — October 17, 2005 @ 8:25 pm

Great write up. I have recently begun studing tags and tagging. my blog.

Comment by Chris — October 18, 2005 @ 10:54 pm

I think it is a misconseption that tagging means we don’t have to think about our categories, and that we can just tag away to our hearts content and the system will be useful.

Also, I think that once people start to accept this as false, they will start to see some of the greater benifits of tagging.

One of the great things I see about them, (altough, i have not seen this implemented anywhere) is that when you tag to a single scheme, you can create extremely useful “fuzzy” categories. Consider this:

Imagine you have a tag called “dictionaries” which is used by your two bookmarks: http://www.dictionary.com and http://www.answers.com.

Now, since http://www.dictionary.com is also tagged with “thesaurus”, and http://www.answers.com is also tagged with “encyclopaedia”, wouldn’t it be nifty if I could set a threshold to let this this next level of tags to creep into my results when i look up dictionagry. This would quite easily allow me to go from lookin for dictionaries, to looking up reference sites in general.

This example is a very simple one, and maybe it doesn’t convey the usefulness of such a feature.

If you are wondering what i meant about using one scheme of catergories, take this example: quite often on del.licio.us, I see people that use “wikipedia” as a tag for all articles in wikipedia that they choose to bookmark (tag based on url), and also use “wikipedia” as a tag for blogs talking about wikipedia (tag based on content).

Now, all that said, I hate sounding like a nazi. People, of course, are free to tag how they like. All I’m saying is they are more useful to use if we give them a bit more thought.

Comment by sidd — October 20, 2005 @ 3:17 am

[...] I’d like to wrap this up by pointing to a post by Frederico Oliveira covering his view on tagging and social bookmarking (be sure to read through the comments, there’s some great stuff there as well). Frederico’s blog is fantastic is all aspects (design and content), which reminds me that it’s time to get rid of this default theme and come up with a custom look ASAP. [...]

Pingback by ghjunior.com » Blog Archive » Web 2.0 From Afar — October 20, 2005 @ 12:08 pm

[...] There’s a survey going on at Spreadshirt now asking just that question: is social bookmarking valuable to you? It’s up for debate. There’s enthusiasm (but, honestly a lot of it seems industry-generated), like Contactivity, who write: At first glance this may not sound terribly revolutionary, and you may not even like the idea of having everyone see your bookmarks, but this very simple technology is potentially as transformative in the way that we all use the web as Google was…the more bookmarks we save, the more unwieldy our collection becomes. Very often we need to save one particular webpage, not an entire site and for this, bookmarks are inefficient. This enables you to save and ‘file’ any individual webpage without having to clutter up your bookmarks with hundreds or thousands of links. Think of social bookmarking as an online filing cabinet, and the keywords, or ‘tags’, you apply to each saved URL as the folders within your bookmarks, but much more dynamic. [...]

Pingback by The Spreadshirt Blog for Shop Partners » Blog Archive » Social bookmarking — May 18, 2006 @ 10:22 am

[...] Webreakstuff: Tagging ‘Tagging’ gives Web a human meaning [...]

Pingback by Themenmonat Tagging: 4. Tagging Strategien | agenturblog.de — June 24, 2006 @ 10:01 pm