[Sigia-l] OT: Library Thing

[Alexander Johannesen]

On 9/29/05, Listera <listera at rcn.com> wrote:
> Yes, but while c) is cheap, b) is free.

No, b) is free in given contexts. :)

> We haven't seen *at all* yet what b) can accomplish.

Oh, we've got some pretty good notions. You have to remember that
tagging isn't new even if it's hugely popular these days. Even within
the library world it's been around for over 30 years (known as 'free
tagging'), and there have been lots of discussions up through the
years of its applicability and wonderfulness. There's reasons why it
started out as a good thing and later abandoned, but that might - and
I would say hope! - be a librarian thing.

> We are at the very
> beginning of the curve here. Aggregation and faceting of distributed tagging
> is a domain yet to be deeply exploited. I'd remain open-minded on this one.

By all means, now that more minds are focused on the tagging way,
something exciting might come out of it, but already we see some
serious flaws in it, such as spelling, language, lazyness, cognitive
differences, etc. To be honest, we'll probably end up at some clever
formulae that computers can use to analyse and digest tags to such an
extent that they provide as good a result as a properly done
controlled vocabulary (for example, lexical analysing and
thesaurus/dictionary lookups with some semantic mapping; I've done a
few prototypes on this already, and they certainly improve things),
and I really hope we get to see that any day now, but I reckon that as
the importance of tagging increases the cost of them will too,
although perhaps in ways we're not aware of yet.

Saying tagging is free is having disregard for what people themselves
reckon their time is worth. Social engineering taps into this magical
"I'd to it for free anyways" pool as long as that pool exsist, but as
our own awareness of the true value of it expands, so it will change.
If anything, what we're observing these days are the benefits to early
adopters, but what happens next I'll agree we know very little about.


Alex
--
"Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know."
                                                         - Frank Herbert
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