Matt Webb and I did a fair amount of work around tagging with a project called Phonetags that I never get time to properly write up. As we were working on it, we came to realise that each of us had a radically different understanding of what a tag was. Matt’s concept was quite close to the way tagging is used in del.icio.us – with an individual the only person who could tag their stuff and with an understanding that the act of tagging was kind of an act of filing. My understanding was heavily influenced by Flickr’s approach – which I think is radically different – you can tag other people’s photos for a start, and you’re clearly challenged to tag up a photo with any words that make sense to you. It’s less of a filing model than an annotative one.

The article in general is quite interesting. My take, though, is that the file metaphor and the annotation metaphor are not so much based on the service (flickr vs delicious) but on the purposes of the user. I was just reading in a book Learner-Centered Design by Wayne Reeves that “deliberate categories [are] those designed by the individuals to meet some goal” p. 103 – and clearly tags are deliberate categories – and clearly Matt and Tom have different goals.

I met Larry Grossberg
yesterday at the UICC conference. I really enjoyed his talk. One thing
he mentioned was that academics often challenge and deconstruct the
categories of others but don’t generally turn the same type of analysis
on the categories that they hold most sacred. That resonated with me
because it was a much more developed and elegant version of what I
was trying to express in a prior post.