Posted on September 20, 2006 at 2:54 PM in thoughts
Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.
"Tagging" in the web context means attaching words or phrases to things as a way to keep them organized. When I tag a URL as I bring it into myFavorites, I create a way to find that URL later, based on the word or words I chose to remember it with. It has benefits for groups and sets of information, but what I'm most interested in in this blog entry is the benefit to the person doing the tagging. To me, the power of tagging for the individual is in it's flexibility and openness, but also because it's actively associative. It involves a split second of deliberation on my part as to what to tag something, and that makes all the difference when it comes to recalling what's there later. I've called your set of tags your overflowing costanza wallet in previous entries.
In this way I see tags partly as mnemonic devices. Because I went through the process of deciding what words to attach to this thing (photo, url, bookmark, etc.), it's likely that when I look over my list of tags, I'll remember what kinds of things I put in each one. It doesn't take long; once you've gone through the process a few times, the act of tagging becomes about as trivial as hitting "save".
In a blog entry about why people tag, Matt McAllister makes the case that tagging is still an edge activity and has too little return to interest regular folk. He thinks it should be more automatic, and more informed by what your browser history knows about you. He writes:
What’s missing from the tagging world is automatic learning. People shouldn’t have to find the ’save’ button, click it, fill in tags, and hit save. My browser history says a lot about what interests me. The time I spend on a page says a lot about what I value. Any social activities I initiate or receive can inform a machine what the world around me thinks about.The influencer is clearly willing to work harder to ensure information flows through the Internet in sensible ways, but everyone else will need something more personal to happen as a result of tagging to warrant the amount of effort to do it.
I'm thinking about a couple of Matt's arguments. First, I'm not sure I agree that the amount of effort it takes to tag stuff on the way in is a major barrier to the system getting wider adoption. I don't have data to back this up, but my gut tells me that it's really a lack of awareness and first-person experience that's the bigger barrier. It's not that people are trying it and giving up because it's too much effort; it's that the utility story isn't getting out there enough to a wide non-power-user audience. The value and efficiency is there, people just don't necessarily know they have something to gain from tagging things on the way into their world.
I'm not sure that the influencer pyramid (that says that of 100 consumers, 1% creates, and 10% synthesizes) applies to tagging as well as it does to more active and time-intensive pursuits like starting an online group or authoring a piece of content. You're not composing a YouTube video here; you're choosing a word to throw something behind for lack of a better place to put it. Often, it's an alternative to saving a URL to your browser's bookmarks, which takes some amount of effort as well.
Second, I'm not sure that Matt would go this far either, but I worry that the idea that making tagging more automatic would bring it wider adoption cuts against the active associative value I referred to earlier. While letting your browser or history do some of the work for you by completely auto-tagging something may save you time on the way in, you still have to find the thing later in order for the system to have value. To me, all you're doing is shifting the time you spend from the input stage to the 'where is that thing again?' stage.
I think *suggesting* tags from your pre-existing set is a great idea, and something that del.icio.us does very well (and we're working on in myFavorites). And a system that *suggested* tags from your browsing history or page context or some other forms of data could be useful if it worked right. But I stop short of the idea that taking the user's agency away from tagging would help them in the long run. I don't think there's any way around the fact that you remember best what you do yourself. Rather than seeing the time it takes as a barrier to adoption, perhaps we should think about how we can best show that tagging is better than the alternatives. For example, when you place social and web-based bookmarking side-by-side with old school browser-based bookmarking, I don't think it's difficult for anyone to see the utility of the web- and tag- based system.