Blog Week 7

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.