How Many People Know How to Tag?

Berin Loritsch — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 14:42:00 +0000

I’m sure it seems odd for me to question this after I’ve doted on its merits and how easy it is to do. How many people use the bookmark tools like Ma.gnolia.com or del.icio.us? How many people have used something like Flickr, etc? When you think about it, the number of sites like this are surprisingly small. Even though there are a number of users, few are there because of the tagging. It’s because they get some value out of the site that they don’t get somewhere else. Flickr works because of the communities, where you can find groups to shoot the breeze or perfect your craft—whatever you want.

Even now, the only thing I use Ma.gnolia.com for is to manage the list of links on my blog. I don’t participate in the groups or anything like that. Quite frankly, I don’t have enough time to read a whole bunch of blogs or follow links like I used to. Tagging the links are less important in that case. Sometimes I want to find an old link, and I can use the tags to get back to the article I wanted. However, after you’ve applied the knowledge in the article a few times, there’s no real value in keeping it around. Yet, there’s effort required to go back and remove it. Since I only list the most recent X number of links on my blog, that’s usually enough for me.

There are some places where I really think that tagging would be the right solution to find things again. One example would be iTunes, or whatever you use to manage your music. Setting up play lists based on tags is a great feature, so I’ve kind of forced that model on iTunes. Of course, I fear such a feature would go wasted on a great number of people because they don’t really see the value in it. Once you get over a certain number of songs you are managing, you really do need a better way to sort and organize your music than just the artist, genre, album type information.

There are some common elements of tagging software such as all the tags are displayed on the right. Sometimes they are shown in clouds, and sometimes they can be combined to narrow the selection more. However, things can become messy when you have the common left side navigation elements along with right side tag information. What’s the right thing to do? Should you mix the functionality of bookmarking sites and information providers?

Honestly, since bookmarking sites make it relatively easy to integrate with other sites, I think that they should handle the bookmarking features, and what you are doing should work on the content. It can get messy quick. Really quick. Should you allow multiple identical tags on an object from different users? How do you display them? If someone deletes a tag, and it’s just their version that goes away and someone else’s tag is there, what should the app do?

Truth be told, tagging is still the realm of power users. I wish it weren’t, but there’s still a lot to be discovered about how people use tags, and the types of things you can do with them.

"How Many People Know How to Tag?" by Doug

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:07:38 +0000

I’d have to agree. Speaking for myself, I know about tagging but generally don’t use it. I just don’t care to keep track of so much stuff that tagging would be useful.

I use del.icio.us as a bookmark site that I can access wherever I go. Tags? I use them a bit. I’ve used maybe three dozen tags over the 3+ years that I’ve used del.icio.us. And I never look at anyone else’s tags.

Flickr? Just like you said. I use it more as a forum than for photo sharing. Heck, I don’t even have a “pro” account, and only uploaded 3 pictures in the past year. I never look at anyone else’s tags here, either. Nor my own, for that matter.

Where I DO use tags heavily is in my digital photo catalog. I’ve got thousands of photos in there, and the only way to find something of interest is by tag. BTW, I’m using the tree-structured catalog tagging system of my photo management tool (idImager Pro, in my case), which is stored externally from the photos. I don’t use IPTC keywords embedded in the photo files themselves.

So there’s one place where I use tags to real advantage. Every now and again I’ll get some use out of del.icio.us tags. But that’s about it.

Just a Thought...: How Many People Know How to Tag?

How Many People Know How to Tag?

"How Many People Know How to Tag?" by Doug