Oct 29, 03:50 am: [tagcamp] Why tags work

(all the dislaimers for live blogging apply: mistakes, misspellings, and misunderstandings)

Basic info:

Notes

  • Tagging works because it meets a personal need
  • mapping between common vocabularies and common topics of interest allow you find people who have the same world model as you
  • don’t yet understand how people go from a personal view to a more social view
  • tagging (despite drawbacks) is useful because it does the kinds of things that people want to do with categorization. And it’s easy.
  • cost of error is lower—using the wrong tag carries a low consequence; putting a document in the wrong folder is bad
  • the notion that a thing should be in one place and one place only and linking, alias, multiple homes is exceptional
  • digital information is completely different from physical information but digital information design relies on metaphors drawn from the physical world
    • happens in any new medium—film was first just a bunch of stage plays; takes a bit for the new medium to catch up to its possibilities
  • if tagging is for personal use, why is it largely social?
    • no good answer in the room
  • tagging is the start of a personal ontological development form
  • flat tagging runs up against a capacity/scalability wall
    • in a hierarchical categorization: labeling something dog automatically includes it in mammals etc
    • there is some depth in a personal tag space that can’t be taken advantage of
  • most groupware systems are set up so that if not enough people are using them, they are not using them. Tagging can be useful to a single user
    • shared calendaring is an example of a single opt-out ruining the value of the system; it completely disrupts the resource
  • key is think about the single person who is using the tagging system and the benefits there

Other notes

tagged: , ,

Marnie Webb  |