Tagging

Part of me feels that this article in PC Magazine is unworthy of comment, another part of me feels like replying in the same tone the article is written in, that arrogant pundit style, but that’s not the right tack either. Instead I’ll just list a few comments below and say that while tagging / folksonomy is perhaps over-hyped among some who write on the web, the remedy is not to go to the opposite extreme and say that there’s nothing to it. The author seems to ignore all of the moderate voices on the subject and set up a straw man to argue against.

“I recall a crazy concept back around 1997–1998, whereby you’d surf through a proxy system that allowed you to overlay entire Web sites with your comment “foil.” Others could use the same system to comment on your comments or put up their own overlay. In many ways this is the subtext that developed into what today are known as wikis.” Ward’s wiki went online in 1995, see Wikipedia article. Most wikis today are encyclopedia or documentation-like, and don’t have much to do with commenting on other sites.

“So far, tags have not even gotten popular enough to reach the stage of vandalism and spam.” Popular is not very specific, but del.icio.us is approaching 100,000 users, with virtually 0 paid advertisements (as far as I know) & I’m quite sure Flickr is doing as well, probably much better in terms of numbers. Unfortunately there are several documented spam attempts on del.icio.us (see the delicious-discuss mailing list archive), they have been so speedily eradicated most people never noticed.

“This one is a laugh riot, since there is nothing new here except the new name: Folksonomy. I mean even in HTML there was the “metatag.” Although I don’t particularly like the term folksonomy, it’s certainly not the same as a metatag in HTML. Bookmark tagging sites (and perhaps others that I’m not aware of) let you tag any web content, not just HTML docs you’ve created. I’ll deal with other differences between folksonomies and various types of metadata in other posts.

“‘You suck!’ is a common post, and it would be the number-one tag if tagging ever became popular” I would venture to say that the term “you suck” has *very* infrequently been posted in the “influential” blogs alluded to in the story, although it does appear in youth journal blogs I wouldn’t say it’s a predominant theme of any kind. Also, when users tag bookmarks, it is very likely for their individual purposes, i.e. so I can find this again, not to send a message to the author of the web page.

I suppose I’ve waisted enough time on this now.