alterity

October 16, 2005

tagging blog round-up

Notes on blog entries about tagging:

Rashmi Sinha: A cognitive analysis of tagging (or how the lower cognitive cost of tagging makes it popular) (September 27, 2005)

Rashmi looks at tagging as a 2-stage cognitive practice. There are great visuals about the cognitive process.

Step 1: "Related Category Activation. The first stage is the computation of similarity between the item and candidate concepts." --> concepts get activated because one is familiar with an object and can connect it to terms. Free association-esque.

Step 2: "Stage 2: The decision. Now that we have candidate categories, we need to make the DECISION. What category is the right one?" This is where we choose the best one, something we do regularly.

Rashmi talks about the "post-activation analysis paralysis" that people go through online when faced with putting something in the right bucket. Online, there's less cultural consensus in the categorization process. We're trying to optimize for future findability (i.e. where we'll look next). We don't just categorize at random - we try to consider the overall categorical scheme.

Normally, we're ok with local categorization schemes, but not online. There's also a huge cost to having to recategorize online. And fear that if we do it wrong, we'll never find it again.

Tagging eliminates the decision and thus the paralysis. And there's immediate self and social feedback.

Ian Davis: Why Tagging is Expensive (September 7, 2005)

"Tagging bulldozes the cost of classification and piles it onto the price of discovery." Formal classification takes a lot of time - tagging overrides that, but there's still a cost to tagging. There's a savings of cost to others' discovery, but the cost is on the tagger to save others.

"In the formal classification world you have a very small number of people incurring a high cost in order to reduce the costs incurred by a very large number of people. In contrast the tagging world has the unit costs reversed: it's cheap to classify, expensive to find. But the numbers of people involved are large in both cases so you end up with a lot of people paying a tiny cost to classify added to a lot of people paying a high price to discover. I think it's pretty likely that the total cost is going to end up much higher than in the classification scenario."

Davis is concerned that tagging will not persist in the long-run because it costs too much and it will be hobbled by this expense.

Adam Weinroth: Tag Team (July 28, 2005)

This post is an interview with Jon Lebkowsky and Clay Shirky about tags. The most important contribution of this post is Clay harping on how tags are not equivalent to folders and should not be treated as such - this makes a poor evaluative framework. He also talks about different processes for find and re-find. Clay also points out that "The context of a tag is critical -- users tag differently on del.icio.us than on Flickr, so treating tags as purely atomic elements strips them of much of their value."

Tom Coates: Two cultures of fauxonomies collide... (June 4, 2005)

"What do changes in a tag-cloud mean?"

• The site has changed?
  
• There's a cultural change in vocabulary (homosexual->gay->queer)? (Vocabulary of post doesn't change, but the conversations around the posts do.)
  
• People approach the act of tagging differently? (filing vs. description)
  

Tom realized that tagging on Flickr is about tagging for any words that make sense while on del.icio.us it's about filing. Two very different paradigms. He shows a shift in del.icio.us on the way people tagged his own blog. And then invites people to test this more broadly.

Pietro Speroni: Tagclouds and Cultural Changes (May 28, 2005)

This post looks at how you can measure the importance of tags by calculating their weight as number of people using a tag / total number of people. He shows various graphs of changes in terms, focusing heavily on the geek community because of its coherence. He does not that "Culture are a decentralised process, and there is no central repository of it. Some group of people might be done with a change, while others are still in the middle of the process." In other words, changes within a culture take time and show segmentations in the culture.

Michael Wexler: I hate tags (February 4, 2005), I still hate tagging (April 13, 2005), I continue to despise tagging (August 1, 2005)

Wexler's posts are critical and skeptical of the tagging hype (which is good). It's a bit hard to read the posts because they are also quite antagonistic (mostly towards Shirky). Still, there are some valuable points in here, particularly to help understand how tagging is being perceived outside of the hype and what problems people are having with it.

He sees tagging as "lazy ontologies" (and takes issue with the way a lot of things are termed in what he sees as crazy unreal terms). [danah note: his frustration over "social software" actually lays the framework for his inability to see that collective terminology has value, even if it is not descriptive.] His problem is that the variations people use are fine on the personal level, but they don't help the "shared social structure."

The bulk of the first post is in objection to Shirky's attitude that folksonomy is the end-all-be-all because it does what controlled vocabularies cannot. Some great quotes:

• "doing the wrong thing is better than nothing?"
• "We don't like taxonomies because they get misused?"
• "Because that what it comes down to: either learn the proper use of a shared taxonomy, or try to figure out how each person chose to organize their content."
• "Basically, he's transferring the cost away from the tagger… and onto the user. Actually, the best bet is simplicity x utility. Ease of use is not the same as utility: folksonomies will stay only as long as good terms are chosen that others can 'grasp'. Once we recognize that we are all using 20 different terms for the same thing, and that's making info hard to access... then we recognize (sigh, yet again) why an organized typology makes sense."

In the second post, he begins by pointing out that tagging is not designed to share, but to create walled gardens. You have to know what you're looking for to find anything. Tagging has been for consumer fun, not for serious knowledge management.

He talks about why searches on tagging systems like del.icio.us are not nearly as fruitful as on Google, focusing on keyword searches. He then points out that entries that he is interested in are in del.icio.us but coded under very obscure tags. He also points out how much specific knowledge you need to know for it to be valuable (like GTD means Getting Things Done).

The comments discuss how his approach is problematic because he equates tagging with search engines rather than thinking about discovery.

The third post returns to a critique of Shirky and related bits. He notes that "the social connected model implies that the connections are the important part." "What tagging does is attempt to recreate the flow of discovery. That's fine… but what taxonomy does is recreate the structure of knowledge that you’ve already discovered." He talks about the conflict between tagging for self and tagging for others.

Thomas Van Der Wal: Explaining and Showing Broad and Narrow Folksonomies (February 21, 2005)

Broad folksonomy: "many people tagging the same object and every person can tag the object with their own tags in their own vocabulary" (lends to power law curve); del.icio.us is a good example.

Narrow folksonomy: "one or a few people providing tags that the person uses to get back to that information" (creates narrowing and focus, "provides benefit in tagging objects that are not easily searchable or have no other means of using text to describe or find the object") - can't tell how the tags are consumed or produced because it's many-to-one instead of many-to-many.

"Not all tagging is a folksonomy." Folksonomy is about creating missing terms to connect words and objects and help the search process.

Tom has visuals to show the narrow/broad distinction.

Category: tagging

Posted by zephoria at October 16, 2005 9:20 PM

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