[Sigia-l] [Iai-Members] Research papers on tagging

[Thomas Vander Wal]

Stephen --

To add to your arsenal, there are many value points for tagging (personal,
social, collective, and occasionally collective). The personal value of
being able to refind information is often under rated. Services that are
built well provide the individual the means to get back to what they found
and annotated in their own context and perspective.

The social components start surfacing with search when these various
contexts and perceptions are added, ConnectBeam does a really good job of
using social bookmarking and personal tagging and layering it on top of
enterprise search (it also extends search to layer on top of terms entered
in public search engines. Social search starts building better understanding
and connecting people to information/objects that they may have missed as
they were seeking the items from a context and perspective that was not in
the data or metadata formally applied to the object. Other social methods,
like Ma.gnolia's groups are really helpful to permit easy access to a
collection of information, but they can also be closed to allow a
comfortable environment for sharing, which is something that ConnectBeam
also does (but does not have the discussion forum in their service).

I have spent a decent amount of time with the Nature Publishing people
regarding their tool Connotea, which is a social bookmarking tool that
allows for tagging of Natures articles and journals by the public as well as
items that are out on the web. While relatively few of the journal articles
have been tagged and those that have been tagged have likely only been
tagged by one person (so far), Nature feels they have a really good success
on their hands. They show they have saved quite a bit of money even by the
sparse tagging. The individual who has tagged is more connected to the
services and their publications through these actions. The tagging has
validated the terms they are using in their taxonomy. They have new terms to
consider adding to their taxonomy. This validation and identifying gaps and
new terms they believe has saved them many thousands of pounds. But, they
believe the biggest value is for them is the improved search within the site
as the tagging adds more pointers to their articles improving its search
value. But, the search value is even more greatly augmented for public
search of their articles as the many pointers and additional context are
included in the search algorithms to improve their weight in search engines.


Services like Connotea are not delivering great value on for the collective
view or collaborative views of perspective (they are working on improving
this), but they have great value for the individual and for themselves as
service owners and publishers.

One thing that surfaces with nearly every discussion with knowledge and IT
shops in mid-sized to large organizations is their strong dislike for
del.icio.us. Part of the dislike is interface and the cognitive hurdle with
the space delimited tag terms (not friendly for the non-geek/tech crowd who
make up most of the potential user base of these serivces). The other big
hurdles is the restrictive use policies around del.icio.us as nearly every
organization has been blocked when using their APIs and services with
del.icio.us. The other barrier is open public sharing, which is really a
difficult cognitive leap for most people as they are most often comfortable
sharing with a group of people they know & del.icio.us is fully public or
private.

It is also important to understand most of the lack of engagement is going
to come from people not understanding what the tools do (if they are
providing comfortable social environment, are using human readable tags and
strings, and easing use for personal, collective, and service use). People
need to have the expected value that they will derive sold to them. They
need to have their fears and apprehensions eased. They will also need to
have use cases for these tools provided that make value sense to them as
they move forward. These soft skills are as important or more important than
the tools. Tools that can discern the facets and map to existing general
concepts will help keep the interface for input simple and provide strong
knowledge value for the system and others. We know from many years of
usability research around KM tools and other information tools that the
heavy form fields deter use.

This should be enough fodder to help. It is a tiny slice of my full-day
workshops I have been doing and presentations around social software to get
much better value out of them through using improved conceptual models for
understanding them. Much of this will be in my O'Reilly book out in late
Fall.

All the best,
Thomas

On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 3:49 PM, Stephen Collins <trib at acidlabs.org> wrote:

> First, sorry for the cross-post.
>
> On another list, I'm having a discussion with an unbeliever
> (ooooohhh!) about the value of tagging. His argument is that given
> everything is searchable, everything automatically becomes a tag he
> can use and tagging is therefore, noise.
>
> I've raised several arguments with him:
>
> - user-defined meaning adding value to formal meaning
> - emergent context and meaning
> - the spurious nature of the every word becomes a tag position based
> on my position that to do so simply creates confusion rather than
> meaning
>
> I've also pointed him at things such as http://steve.museum/, David
> Weinberger's "Everything is Miscellaneous" and Thomas' work. He
> remains unconvinced.
>
> Can anyone point me at some research that shows the value of tagging?
> I know I can search for it, but I also know the brains trust here will
> have their fingers on stuff that will be better or more valuable in
> other ways.
>
> TIA.
>
> Steve
> --
> Stephen Collins
>
> www.acidlabs.org
> +61 410 680722
>
> acidlabs - strategies, tools and processes to empower knowledge workers
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