About 2 year ago I began to get really excited about tagging and what you could do with it. Tags were amazing, they were like a new toy that I couldn’t get enough of. I would tag my photos, tags my bookmarks, tag my this, tag my that - I thought tagging solved a lot of the world’s problems.
Now - jump ahead to today and I’m realizing tagging is (in its current state) useless for helping people recall information. I’ve been using tagging for keeping track of my bookmarks for quite some time now and without fail, I’m rarely ever able to remember what I tagged a certain website. I’ll spend sometimes up to 5 minutes with a determined focus to find that really cool link I want to show someone. It just doesn’t work.
Working on different apps and thinking about how tags work within those apps, I constantly get stuck on how many tags I’m beginning to generate and there just becomes to many. I try to give an item multiple tags so if I don’t remember it being one thing - I may remember it being another.
First question you may ask - Are you tagging for yourself or other people?
The quick answer is - for myself (at least right now).
Tagging for yourself is what you’re supposed to do and what various experts say on the subject (including Thomas Vander Wal and Rashmi Sinha who I had the chance to see speak in person on the subject).
What I do find tagging extremely useful for it tagging for other people. It’s supposed to be a “no-no” but it’s what I see works within the current state of tagging and how the web uses them. I love being able to search through flickr’s tags or see what’s popular on del.icio.us. Doing things like this allows me to peek into the rest of the world and see what’s going on and begin spotting trends or world discoveries. This all brought to you by the power of tagging for other people.
So what now? If you’re not supposed to tag for other people and only tag for yourself, what are we to do? Your answer, develop better tools to help people like me remember things. My interests change, my experiences change and my knowledge changes. What I used to call something may not be completely different as I obtain those three things. I want a tool that learns alongside me and helps me organize things, not keep track of how stupid I maybe once was or constantly insult me on my previous lack of knowledge.
Until people begin to figure out how to create better interfaces (and experiences with those interfaces), tags are useless when tagging for yourself. I’m fine with going back to categories and sub-categories. Allowing for less is much better long-term than offering me more.
posted on July 24, 2006 | 9:08 PM EST
Add to the discussion.
I believe tagging, much like other forms of communication (email, IM, voicemail), is only useful when used properly. If I receive a 10,000 word email, I will most likely never make it past the second sentence. There are thousands of articles written on proper email etiquette.
So what is the proper etiquette for tagging?
Here are three tips for making your tags more effective…
1) Tag with at least 2 tags, never more than 3.
2) Tag using nouns, not adjectives.
3) Tag by asking, “how would I search for this using Google”
I think that’s a small step but it’s really a matter of interface and how current apps know how to work with tags - it’s not useful and everyone knows it. The problem is being able to evolve to the next step which is hard to do.
As for tagging with only 2 tags, I think that’s a nice idea but not sure if it really works or is ideal in practice. I can think about a subject in a variety of ways. It could be recalled as video, flash, programming, design, etc… Am I refering to the video, the flash player the video is being played it, the context of the video, etc… (note: I’ve briefly discussed why tagging is useful for photo’s and video earlier)
Along with that, my knowledge/understanding of a subject changes over the years and what I used to call something isn’t what I thought of it a year or 2 ago.
I do like number 3. I haven’t thought about it quite like that yet.
Tagging needs to be more humanized; meaning, tagging systems need to reflect the attention spans of the users.
I say tag for others. This way you can both find it. This tends to make you think about how others would search for this (how you would search for it in Google). Then you can use your google search skills to find your own things while also having a more open attitude toward your work helping the community.
I reject the idea of only 2-3 tags. Managing what tags you use seems tedious. Is it “truck” or “trucks”? Just fill the tags up with anything you can think of that someone might search for this by, especially if they forget the real name.
Other approaches to tagging, I think, require more attention to detail and effort than most people are willing to put into it. I’m not sure this will be solved by a slicker interface, but I may be wrong. My opinion differs in the corporate world. Enforcement of standards of tagging should be possible within an entity with an eye to greater automated use of the material.
There’s my 2 cents.
I like the outlining of the needs. It is going to be important for those that want to move tagging forward.
The tagging for one’s self first is important for refinding the information and applying least messy tags. There are social tags that can be applied for others, but the best results for one’s self and others is when the tagging is done for one’s self in one’s own vocabulary.
As far as how many tags, there really is not a minimum number that is helpful, but for recall the more tags applied that are valid in the person applying the tags mind the better. Missing tags are a greater cause for not finding an object than too many tags. If systems are built properly it is easy to sort and filter based on individuals tags you agree with. It is easier in del.icio.us, but not even possible in Flickr.
I completely agree: tags simply don’t work for large heterogeneous domains and better they don’t scale.
The problem is the completely lack of structure in the name of simplicity.
Anyway, in order to make a real use of tagging interfaces, users need a way to search and navigate tags’ spaces efficiently (without reading all the 3000 terms of a tag clouds).
Clever aggregation/clustering algorithms (see Rawsugar, Flickr and Stanford experiments for examples) are a way, but even the best results don’t seem to be so useful to ‘surf the system’. Using Flickr tags you can see clusters (i.e associative relationships) but no more than that and can you imagine how to assign a name automatically to each cluster?
Imho, the answer is again letting users do the work. Why? Sure, not for their good heart. Give them a reason, a clear benefit, an immediate value. That value is findability, it is browsability and scalabilty.
We can find a better tradeoff between simplicity and structure. Understanding your users behaviour and needs is again the rght method to find this tradeoff.
I’m working on that.
Cheers,
Emanuele
In the area of recalling tags, it would be nice to see all my tags from various sites and pull them all into one area for better recall.
I know some people are doing this (programmers mostly) and places like 43places.com, 43things.com and Threadless.com are making it easier for normal web users. The Threadless experience was my personal favorite in the sense that they made it really easy to setup.
Agree.
I’ve generally found that my own tags are either obvious (unimformative, too general) or useless (unguessable, too specific) once enough time has passed since the tagging event. I just don’t have enough to go on to reconstruct mindset and context, so I no longer bother tagging anything. Fulltext search is enough for me.
Rick Says:
I believe tagging, much like other forms of communication (email, IM, voicemail), is only useful when used properly. If I receive a 10,000 word email, I will most likely never make it past the second sentence. There are thousands of articles written on proper email etiquette.
So what is the proper etiquette for tagging?
Here are three tips for making your tags more effective…
1) Tag with at least 2 tags, never more than 3.
2) Tag using nouns, not adjectives.
3) Tag by asking, “how would I search for this using Google”