Looking on the bright side.
Tara Calishain is the editor of the always interesting weekly ResearchBuzz
which brings a wide variety of search related information to its readers. The
title of one of her columns from November 2005 makes her position on the subject
pretty clear: Why
I Love Tagging. Calishain lists six reasons for her positive attitude toward
tags. Among these are that it allows for simple searches, and that it's quick
and easy. My favorite, however, is the fifth: It helps me learn your language.
With this reason Calishain touches on an important aspect of the essence of tagging.
As individual searchers of information we construct our own vocabularies of search.
When we view the tags that others have used we broaden our own perspective on
a topic. We not only gain additional search terms that can help us find worthwhile
information, we also learn how the topic that interests us interacts and intersects
with others that we may not have thought were related.
But even though her reasons are actually quite convincing, what's perhaps most
interesting about her column is the realization that it was written almost a year
and a half ago. Today, tagging seems to be exceedingly mainstream. From today's
perspective, it seems to have caught on so quickly that it's hard to imagine that
it may have once been controversial. Thus it's a bit strange to read the apologetica
that opens Calishain's column. Reading that intro reminds us that not very long
ago tags were actually a heated issue:
Tagging has not been getting much love lately in the circles I travel. Some people mention that they don't like tagging, some don't see the point, some decry the spammers insinuating themselves into tagging, and some just want to do more complicated full-text searching instead of doing single word searching.
I hate to be not cool, but I love tagging.
Less than two months before Calishain wrote, Rashmi Sinha had also
approached tagging with a hesitancy that, again, seems rather incongruous
from the distance of a year and a half. She opens with an admission that she "struggled
with this topic", and then, as she attempts to make sense of it, tells us:
The rapid growth of tagging in the last year is testament
to how easy and enjoyable people find the tagging process. The question is how
to explain it at the cognitive level. In search for a cognitive explanation
of tagging, I went back to my dusty cognitive psychology textbooks.
A couple of months after Calishain's article, Laura Crossett (a librarian, by
the way), was still wondering about the worth of tagging, but didn't seem to be
getting overly excited over the issue. Writing
in her blog, Crossett opened her post with a story from her family:
Once my grandmother asked my father and her cousin how she ought to organize her books. One said “Size!” and the other said “Color!” and, well, it went downhill from there. Despite my talk of growing up in a house with a card catalog, I’m not so great at organization myself.
She continues by telling us that she's learned to live with how she organizes
her books, but that her del.icio.us account presents new problems. Then, after
examining how some of her tags are too inclusive until they're meaningless, and
how others are too arbitrary, she concludes:
Don’t get me wrong – I love del.icio.us, I love tagging,
I love the wisdom of the crowds – but I also have a newfound respect for the
catalogers and ontologists of the world. They’ve got their work cut out for
them.
I can't argue with her. As captivating as tagging may be, even as we love it,
we're also acutely aware of its limitations.
Go to: ... yet such heated emotions, or
Go to: But you can, you can!