The Confusing World of Tags

Posted on March 15, 2006

Tagging has made finding things easier but it is far from perfect. CNET's media blog explained why in an entry that shows how the tag for "Afghan" can be confused.

But in a panel entitled "Beyond Folksonomies: Knitting tag clouds for grandma" at the South by Southwest conference here, a panel discussion with more than 200 in attendance was the place for some of the most clued-in taggers and fans of folksonomies in the world to vent about how they find the technology sorely lacking for true usefulness.
In general, the conversation went, tagging is a wonderful tool, but often doesn't meet users' needs because as it stands today, it leaves out too much context: What does the tag "afghan" mean? Is it a dog, a blanket, someone from Afghanistan?

To techies tagging is not a very difficult concept but many bloggers still don't use tags. Some have still not heard about them and others bloggers don't know how to tag posts. Teal Sunglasses lists a few of the issues keeping bloggers from using tags.

The problem with tagging is that it requires the writer to manually tag their articles. This is a flawed requirement on any number of levels:
1) most users don't, won't, or have no idea what you're talking about. 2) humans are rotten at tagging. 3) humans are even more rotten at figuring out what tags OTHER people will look for the piece under.

An organized agreed-upon tagging system is needed but is it possible? Would it be something resembling the Dewey Decimal System to get everything at least under the correct subject. How would this be done? Would you have a special subject tag and then the rest of the tags would relate to the subject tag? An organized tagging system will only work if everyone follows the rules which seems unlikely since many people blog in different ways and about different things -- and for different reasons. Another issue will be how to stop all the spam tags once they start arriving in droves.