I have been mulling over a big old post about tagging and folksonomies, but book work has taken priority this week, and by now most of what I wanted to say has been said by others (here are some good links).
So this is all I think I’ll throw in to the discussion — and append to my previously posted skepticism that people beyond early adopters will pursue tagging with any avidity: “Tagging” is a great word. “Categories” are onerous; they sound like work. “Tags” sound like play — like a game we played when we were tots. (Hey, it’s ludic!)”Categories” also implies, to many users, a mental model in which each item must live in one category to the exclusion of others. “Tags” encourages overlap, duplication, experimentation.
I like the way David Weinberger puts it here, as he compares older-fashioned information hierarchies with folksonomic tagging: “The old way creates a tree. The new rakes leaves together…. The old way — trees — make sense in controlled environments where ambiguity is dangerous and where thoroughness counts. Trees make less sense in the uncontrolled, connected world that cherishes ambiguity.” And the world of software is so allergic to ambiguity that we should cherish any new development that opens a space within the digital realm for multiple meanings.
If the software that begins to harness the tagging phenomenon can stay true to the spirit the word evokes, I think it has a chance of overcoming human inertia and resistance to doing more than the bare minimum of metadata labor. Which places a premium (as Ross Mayfield points out) on ease of use. If people are going to tag things at all, you need to make it really easy for them to do it fast. Del.icio.us — once you set up its toolbar shortcut — is pretty good, though I think it would be great if it showed you how other people tagged a link before you did your own tagging. Technorati’s experiment with tagging for blog postings obviously has a very long way to go, but it’s moving in the right direction.
Will the whole thing get debased by commercialism and swamped by spam? Sure. Then we’ll return to the drawing board.
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