What are some of the weaknesses of tagging for making content more findable? (Tags = blogpostwk7, blogpostwk7n4)
The major weakness behind tagging content for findability is the fact that it is an ad-hoc action; unstructured and off the cuff. Categorization in the traditional sense was created to produce a logical, ordered, and consistent system of organizing and also finding data. Granted, anyone who's studied the history of librarianship knows that cataloging was not originally intended to be used for such things, but it's had hundreds of years to become that, so we'll ignore that part. Ultimately, cataloging is an effective, but somewhat slow means of organizing and retrieving data.
Tagging is fast and easy, but there's not as much thought put behind the work. It's a case of throwing it out there, and then letting the search engine do the rest of the work. That's fine and good in most cases, but when you're trying to build a consistent, professional database for storing materials, this just doesn't work. The more technical issues of aboutness become major issues; especially when you start splitting hairs over the intended meanings behind particular words. Sometimes those aren't universal, and you come up with a big mess in terms of organization.
That's not to say that tagging is bad, but it's important to consider what it's being used for. When tagging is used for personal photos among friends, blog posts (like this one), etc; then it's just fine. Your friends generally know what you mean when you mark something with a tag and they just go with it. But, when you're creating a database collection for a much larger group of people to use, you have to stop assuming everyone knows what you're talking about. Often in my opinion, tagging becomes overloaded with terms to represent its content when all it does is just create more confusion. Want a real life example? Website metatags during the early days of the browser wars between Netscape and Microsoft. Websites become overloaded with tags that often had nothing to do with the content of the page, and there was no rhyme or reason to it all. The result? No one could find anything. You think search engines are bad now? Be glad you never had to use Hotbot or Alta Vista back in 1995.
I agree with you, Binh. Tagging, I think, is great in concept but when it's put into practice for large projects it can become very difficult to fix on a word that everyone will understand to describe the content.
ReplyDeleteWhen I did my cataloging class one of the hardest things was figuring out how to actually catalog something! It seems that right when you think you've done it, you find someone that would catalog it differently or someone who cannot find the information based on the cataloging used.
With tagging, it is fast and easy, but there is no structure to it. If I want my blog read, I have to go through and make sure everything in that post is tagged in a way that will allow it to show up in search results, which in itself could turn into a lot of work. If I pick the first word that comes to mind that, to me, explains the content I may realize that the word does not explain it to others.
You are right when you said that one has to consider the context in which tagging will be used. For casual use, it is quite convenient. But when it comes to bigger projects more structure needs to be added either by using a cataloging database or having users come up with a type of protocol for tagging.
There certainly is a lot to be asked for when talking about folksonomies, but I think that you hit on something when you described that certain circles can use a still informal--in the sense that it is not proscribed or written down as a sort of rule--tags to find certain posts. All it took was out professor spelling out a few simple tags and we have a language we can all use to tag our posts. No complicated rulebooks necessary.
ReplyDeleteFolksonomies thrive most though, when they are tagging things that would likely not receive tagging otherwise. The person that tags all of their bookmarks or blogs may never do that if they had to adhere to a strict format. It would simply be more of a burden or hindrance than an added, simple benefit to many. So while there are discovery problems with folksonomies, there are also methods--such as clustering and suggesting terms within Delicious--that minimalize their impact.