[Sigia-l] Eliminating categories in favour of tagging

[Dmitry Nekrasovski]

Alex et al.,

Thanks for your replies. It seems that there are a few things I should
clarify about the context of my original question:

1) The categories in question are categories in the context of
blogging (i.e. user-generated ones that vary on a per-blog basis),
rather than a central category system.

2) The tagging in question is free tagging with an
autocomplete/recommender feature similar to Google Suggest.

3) The dataset is very large and diverse (8,000 blogs in multiple
languages on every subject you can imagine).

Dmitry




On 3/9/06, Alexander Johannesen <alexander.johannesen at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/10/06, Dmitry Nekrasovski <mail.dmitry at gmail.com> wrote:
> > My employer is in the process of upgrading its internal blogging
> > platform. The new version announcement came out a couple of days ago,
> > and contained a statement to the effect of "since tagging is the new
> > best practice in metadata generation for blogs, the new version will
> > not have post categories, only tags".
> >
> > What does everyone think of this move from an IA standpoint? Please
> > don't get caught up on the "best practice" part... :)
>
> Hmm, who was it that coined "tagging is poor-mans uncontrolled
> vocabulary"? Maybe I just did, but it's a good quote. :)
>
> Well, apart from being a best-practice thing, it's also a misguided
> one. First of all, a category system is an attempt to unify
> categorisation, while tagging does the opposite. A category system
> ensures that everything must fits into those categories even when they
> probably shouldn't (a problem we're trying to solve), while tagging
> creates one category for every plural and spelingmisstake there is (a
> problem with the problem-solver). In essense, tagging is an attempt at
> organic faceted organisation, and sure it works for simple things but
> as soon as you *need* those tags to have applicability within
> controlled systems, you need to have some form of concesus on them.
>
> Recent thinking (actually, if you move in library circles it ain't
> recent at all, but hey ...) involves 40% pre-defined categories (2 to
> 3 levels, depending on how brave you are) and 60% tagged
> sub-categories, with various degrees of flexibility within those
> percentages. It's based on the thinking that if a tag is mismatched it
> at least has a few parents that will be valuable and workable, so
> tagging within a simpler category system. Another way to do this is to
> make tags a part of a dynamic controlled vocabulary, but this requires
> some technical implementation thinking as well as a purely knowledge
> management thinking.
>
> Of course, blind tagging (non-classified) is a basic faulty faceted
> system and works for hobbyists and with small datasets, so if your
> stuff doesn't need that degree of absoluteness or is reasonably small
> and not too diverse in scope, I don't see any problem with it.
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Alex
> --
> "Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know."
>                                                          - Frank Herbert
> __ http://shelter.nu/ __________________________________________________
>


--
Dmitry Nekrasovski
http://www.smallmultiples.com