Why people tag
Categories: Information Architecture, Joshua Porter
Tags: folksonomies, folksonomy, tagging
Lately, every and each day, a new folksonomical web 2.0 startup seems to born. Going a step further and trying to catch their mission, their added value, the innovation they introduce very often you will find nothing new!
As if Web 2.0 was a goal in itself: creating a new service inspired to the widespread new web principles.
For a part of the user base the value of such services is browsing and searching for new contents (videos, links, papers, ideas, handmade objetcs, etc). So it’s easy to understand that this user generated content (and users of course) is the real stragetic value here. More information your users introduce in the system more page views, more traffic and more citations your platform gets.
But where does this value/content come from?
Joshua hits as always the point with its The Del.icio.us Lesson where he says that “Personal Value Precedes Network Value”. That is, people don’t tag to make the world better! People don’t collaborate to enhance the system value, to produce useful content or to help others to find interesting articles. Tagging is only a side-effect.
This all means that if you want to attract new users or keep your existing ones, you have to give them a value, a useful tool, one that lets them do their work easibily, more effectively, with reduced effort or in a richer empowered way.
Quoting Joshua:
Personal Value Precedes Network Value :
The one major idea behind the Del.icio.us Lesson is that personal value precedes network value. What this means is that if we are to build networks of value, then each person on the network needs to find value for themselves before they can contribute value to the network. In the case of Del.icio.us, people find value saving their personal bookmarks first and foremost. All other usage is secondary.
As people use Del.icio.us more, and in order to gain more personal value, they use tags to be able to find their bookmarks later. Tagging isn’t even the primary function of Del.icio.us. Most of the tagging done on Del.icio.us is done secondarily, and for personal use.
The social value of tags on Del.icio.us is only a happy side-effect. Even though most of the ink spilled about Del.icio.us is about the social value, it’s really not the reason why people use it.
Starting from this vision, a question arises: having reached the zero level of complexity with flat tagging, while social bookmarking systems evolve gaining more size and users, does the value provided by the system grow as well?
In other words: when I (and more and more people like me) have saved 500-1000 bookmarks that del.icio.us keeps and shows basically as a flat/weighted list, how can I use this information effectively? Keeping things found and discovering new stuff is the value for me, but having to access my bookmarks only through a list (1 dimension) strongly reduces the value of the information because browsability and serendipity are dramatically limited.
That’s why I push towards a tagging evolution.
In the same category:
May 3rd, 2006 at 7:04 pm
Hi,
First I would like to show you my appreciation for the quality of the posts, I am really following them and appreciating the links.
For this post I want to say that I am a delicious user and they do have something that goes toward tags aggregation of a loose hiarearchic system.
They are called “bundles” and they allow you to group a couple of tags under the same umbrella. (you can see them used under my account del.iciou.us/mapopescu).
Maybe they build from the buttom up a loose hierarchy by using these bundles. I didn’t studied their new “network” feature but it seems to me they are heading to aggregate tags into something.
Best regards
May 3rd, 2006 at 7:47 pm
Hi Marius,
Thank you for your comment.
I’m a delicious user too (to be sincere I’m using more and more Rawsugar lately) and I’m using bundles (or clusters as other systems call them).
Every tagging service today is providing some form of clustering, but clusters are really different from hierarchies.
The broader/narrower terms relationship is different from the associative one and while there a lot of studies (I’ve posted on them) about the automatic hierarchization of clusters, I’m deeply convinced that nothing can replace the semantical value that users can give.
Agglomerative clustering, wordnet baset hierarchization, similarity graphs based hierarchization are wonderful directions that anyway are not providing good enough results.
Anyway the most important point here is that you need a hierarchy, not only (but maybe also) bundles (or related tags).
Cheers,
Emanuele
May 8th, 2006 at 9:24 am
Emanuele,
Thank you for your response. Your latest Etsy example (Facets are easy and love tagging) and this post made me understand better what you are saying.
I guess trying for himself is another way to see better so I’ll try to add facets in a webshop we have in work.
For now, it had only “standard” categories. But after a year or so of use, the client is proposing to add certain “axes” transversal to those standard categories, axes related to the client’s domain.
Can you explain more about what you calle din your latest post “Ranganathan PMEST super categories”? Or provide some links to existing works…
Anyway, thank you for your time,
Marius
May 8th, 2006 at 10:16 am
Ranganathan was an indian librarian that in the first part of this century revolutioned the way people classified books.
His approach was based on the idea of describing a subject through his aspects that he called facets. Facets were somewhat like cartesian coordinates in a multidimensional space and combining in an arbitrary order different coordinates the user can restrict the result space arriving to identify single items.
These facets, Ranganathan thought, could be generally grouped in a few super categories that were:
P personality
M matter
E energy
S space
T time
For each category, a specific faceted classification can identify one or more actual facets. Super categories can be used as a guideline to develop faceted models.
More on this:
http://www.kmconnection.com/DOC100100.htm
http://www.miskatonic.org/library/facet-web-howto.html
http://www.miskatonic.org/library/facet-biblio.html
http://www.poorbuthappy.com/fcd/
July 26th, 2006 at 4:09 am
Tagging 2.0: Would a ‘rose’ tagged by any other name smell as sweet?
A Survey of Tagging Trends to Answer the Question "What's all of the fuss about?"
When one digs (or is it diggs?) into tagging, what started out as a really simple way to identify resources quickly gets complicated (anyone up for "d…
May 21st, 2007 at 9:07 pm
Have u ever wondered why do ppl tag ? I think I might know why, PPl tag because they want to be cool,or probably want others to know where they are from and who did the tagging……..