August 22, 2005
Fluff aside, how useful are tags?
I've been wondering how much I get out of tagging my bookmarks on del.icio.us. Tags are indeed helpful for temporarily grouping resources (e.g. for a research paper) or for gimmicks such as the quicklinks for this weblog (which are all my bookmarks with a particular tag). Being a geek and all I also enjoy the cozy feeling induced by diligently annotated data, which on its own has all the practical applications of a neatly trimmed Bonsai tree.
What I just don't see happening with my own tags is the emergence of a lasting vocabulary that would allow me to quickly retrieve existing bookmarks even years after they were entered. I often discover that I had filed a link under different tags than I thought, and end up searching my entire bookmarks Google-style, which always gets me what I'm looking for. When it comes to self-organization, braindead search beats tagging big time.
Taking a step back, the social aspect of tagging has much more
mundane applications than an emergent "folksonomy". It's cool that
I can subscribe to a particular person's links, which has
nothing to do with tagging. I cannot imagine ever subscribing to
a popular tag. It frightens me that Bloglines registers
63 subscribers
to the del.icio.us tag programming.
These people must have entirely too much time and a
signal-to-noise threshold of miniscule proportions.
Another issue is that I see little incentive to care how other
people would tag a link, or which tags are popular. I can tag
a link with either programming or development. While programming is more widely used, why should I give a damn? This makes the whole prediction about
evolving towards a common set of tags somewhat
moot. Remember the fairy tale about how folksonomies would be like
dirt tracks in the forest, where the best paths would pave themselves
through the increasing number of people passionately agreeing with each
other? Back in the days it sounded like such a neat analogy
that we all believed it was going to happen. Two years later
I no longer see why a public folksonomy would stabilize itself unless there is a huge incentive to being found under a popular tag.
Flickr might be a place where such an incentive exists. The difference between Flickr and del.icio.us is that at Flickr users tag their own content. Because everything on the internet is about either money or narcissism, everyone wants their product to be seen and there's a real reason to tag a photo beach rather than seaside.
Comments
This is a manual trackback. :-)
(Note: at the time of this writing, I cannot upload it to the live site yet.)
Posted by Aristotle Pagaltzis (#)
Thanks for the reply, Aristotle.
I will probably keep tagging my bookmarks furiously just to enter more keywords for later searches. I'm too lazy to edit a bookmark description after pasting in some quote from the original page, so pretty much all my personal annoation goes into the tags.
Posted by
Henning Koch ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.netalive.org/swsu/nav-commenters.gif)
(#)
I do spend a fair amount of time on any particular bookmark. But that’s because I don’t see del.icio.us as a replacement for browser bookmarks, only as a complement.
Browser bookmarks work well as a scratchpad for transient links and really well as a launchpad to frequent destinations. del.icio.us will never match that.
What browser bookmarks horribly fail at is as an attic for filing interesting links that may or may not one day be of interest (again). The main reason is their hierarchical organization, which is thoroughly useless for that purpose. Tagging + description is a qualitative step above that.
del.icio.us therefore is more of an archive for my purposes, and so the links that I put there get the sort of attention one would expect.
Posted by Aristotle Pagaltzis (#)
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