[Sigia-l] Eliminating categories in favour of tagging

[Jared M. Spool]

At 12:39 PM 3/10/2006, Dmitry Nekrasovski wrote:
>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.

Something important I'm not seeing in this discussion is who is doing the 
tagging and what is their motivation? Are the same people who benefit from 
the tags the ones who produce them?

Every piece of content has one or more producers and zero or more 
consumers. (A third party may be a "librarian" who doesn't produce nor 
consume, but does classify.)

Are the producers (blog post authors in this case) doing the tagging? Or 
are the consumers (blog post readers)?

Tagging, when it seems to work, works best when the person doing the 
tagging is the recipient of the value of the tagging. Delicious tags are 
primarily consumer-driven and the highest value is returned to the original 
tagger when they go to find the bookmark again.

Flickr tags are primarily producer-driven, but, again, most of the benefit 
is derived when the producer actually consumes their own pictures. A small 
subset of flickr tags are community driven (such as the current SXSW06 tag, 
not to be confused with the SXSW2006 tag or SXSWI06 tag or TaraHunt tag) 
when a community, through some external meme-driven force agrees on a tag 
to use.

One of the factors that works against successful implementation of these 
types of things is when the benefit is derived from people other than those 
doing the work. If the consumers reap the benefit of a good tagging system, 
but the producers do all the tagging, it's likely not to work out. The 
rewards just aren't there.

So, how is the tagging happening and who benefits from it?

Jared


Jared M. Spool, Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering
4 Lookout Lane, Unit 4d, Middleton, MA 01949
978 777-9123   jspool at uie.com  http://www.uie.com
Blog: http://www.uie.com/brainsparks