[IxDA Discuss] Is social tagging a success?

[Christine Boese]

Interesting topic! I'd like to weigh in here with an example from left
field, the 1980s.

At the time I was a university photographer, and besides shooting for the
viewbook and news releases, and running a professor portrait studio, I was
also the keeper of the university's official photo archives, hardcopy, of
course, slides and negs, some prints, going back to the late 1800s.

When I started the job, I inherited a system that was a godawful mess, and I
had to fix it. As it was, someone would call for an image of some building
from a certain time, and there was no way I could put my hands on it,
despite a card system and a wall full of loose leaf notebooks holding sheets
of slides and negs.

Folks in library science can have a good giggle now, but I was a
photographer, OK? I had to work up a new system for the stuff I was
shooting, and at least start back-cataloging as I found things by request.

The WORST thing about it was the half-assed card system the previous
photographer had used: single category per shoot. That was no help for
locating building shots, images of past chancellors, etc.

I tried using categories like keywords, to generate as many as possible on
the sheets and in the card system, but as you can guess, the job was way too
huge for one understaffed office to do.

The moral of my story, obvious I suppose to library science folks, was that
even with as many categories as I could come up with, my solitary actions
could not anticipate all the possible uses of any one image. The collective
or hive mind would have been far better at the job. But even it could not
anticipate every possible use of the image.

Later, in grad school, my dissertation advisor had a wild theory, that each
and every word should be hyperlinked in a text. Sure, that's nutty, from a
focused IxD usability standpoint, but we were working with Vannevar Bush's
ideas from 1945, of the Memex machine. Bush was a scientist, and he was
wanting to facilitate the accessibility of a rapidly growing body of
scientific knowledge that no one person could ever be expected to master or
stay on top of. And he especially saw hierarchies of knowledge as part of
the obstruction that hurt accessibility.

Bush wanted to increase the number of pathes to any given piece of
knowledge. The Semantic Web, collectively-authored by the hive mind (instead
of top down by CERN or something) allows future AI agents to parse and
conceivably restructure the information in any number of ways. I, for one,
would like to see parts of speech become an element of tagging, for
instance. I'd like to see more meta-data incorporated into it.

So I hear you say (good ears, I have) that bad tagging by less responsible
members of the hive mind will dilute the value of the entire enterprise. No
argument there. My photo catalog at the university was a nightmare
specifically because of such bad tagging practices, but solo bad tagging
practices.

However, does that necessarily HAVE to be the case? What if we think in
terms of Both/And instead of Either/Or? Say you've got a bucket of tags for
any given item. Some tags are useful, and some are poorly typed,
inappropriate, or silly. If there are enough tags in the bucket, wouldn't
the larger number of appropriate tags cancel out the inappropriate ones?

But like a Google Bomb, the system could be gamed. Fill the bucket up with
tags of George Bush and "miserable failure" and the tags are overwhelmed.
That's the biggest drawback I can see. A job for spammers and botnets, eh? A
denial of service attack could bring down the entire future AI-driven
Semantic Web?

Chris

ps I seem to remember George W and Vannevar being related, btw. That's your
irony for the day. But George W comes from the Prescott line, and I think
Vannevar, a different branch, like great great uncle or something.

On 11/10/06, Gabriel White <gabrielwhite at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Jack,
>
> I feel that it's kind of like asking "are combo boxes a success?" -
> social tagging is a design element that can be used - for good or evil
> - in various ways to various degrees of effectiveness.
>
> I use del.ico.us to find things, and often it turns up useful stuff.
> When I'm trying to track down a photo on a particular subject,
> Flickr's tags often deliver the goods. I use tags to "categorise" the
> posts in my blog, and it's worked much better than an exclusive
> hierarchy of categories. But browse through www.techcrunch.com, and
> I'm sure you'll dig up many counterexamples that show tagging is just
> plain useless.
>
> So, for del.icio.us and Flickr, social tagging has been successful.
> And it's arguable that social tagging is probably a really good way of
> solving the particular design problem these sites are trying to
> address.
>
> Gabe
>
> www.smallsurfaces.com
>
>
> On 11/11/06, jackbellis.com <jackbellis at hotmail.com> wrote:
> > Christina,
> >
> > "Useful," "Valuable Tool" "Useless but Indispensably Entertaining?"
> >
> > I think in my use of the term, its interpretation is a subjective matter
> at
> > the discretion of the person answering the question. For instance, I
> might
> > have used some sort of test like "is very helpful for seeking out things
> on
> > the web" but right away I learned that it's also used for filtering,
> which
> > presumably implied pulled-pushed information.
> >
> > In case you were wondering, I wasn't after a numerical value such as
> > adoption ratio. It wouldn't concern me that only a small fraction of
> users
> > have adopted it, but rather, the degree to which those users consider it
> a
> > success.
> >
> > Kind regards, Jack
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Christina Wodtke" <cwodtke at eleganthack.com>
> > > define "success"
> > >
> > > jackbellis.com wrote:
> > > > Is social tagging a success?
> > > >
> > > > I'm not a strong user of it, so I'm curious what the perception is.
> It
> > seems to be highly adopted, but I want to know if it works well when
> seeking
> > out information?
> > > >
> > > > My Luddite hardcopy background makes me wonder if its lack of
> hierarchy
> > is an Achilles' heel. (Perhaps specifying multiple tags is the
> workaround.)
> > I've also noticed a recently-mentioned site where one term  seemed
> > infiltrated with overly promotional links, thus my motivation to
> inquire.
> > > >
> > > > -Jack
> >
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-- 
christine boese
www.serendipit-e.com