I’m again and again thinking about how tagging, as we know it now, is not working. It simply cannot scale and it cannot be really applied to contexts in which finding or keeping things found is fundamental.

A post that I read casually from Volkan Ozcelik impressed me a lot:

In need of organizing my tags

I have literally thousands of bookmarks on delicious (and the number is increasing each day)

http://del.icio.us/vozcelik/

imho, most of the links are quite fruitful, however they are way to widespread to be accessed easily.

And I think it’s time to categorize this mess a bit.

I really need to reduce the amount of tags I use.

My gut feeling is that, after the hype, people cannot use the folksonomies we have today. More and more companies are introducing new applications every day. None of them is really trying to find out how to win this game or to reach the next level.

This user concludes: “I really need to reduce the amount of tags I use.” I really need to reduce the amount of tags I use??? This is what we got today: our tags will grow becoming USELESS.

We need a structure! I can hear people saying “tagging is the zero level of concept association and we don’t want to think before categorizing thinks”, but this approach doesn’t scale!

Metadata ecologies are the future..

In the same category:

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 1st, 2006 at 2:16 pm and is filed under Information Architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.