I’m probably the last person in the industry to have finally figured out what tagging is, but I’m not afraid to admit it. A couple months ago, we were discussing tagging trips within Yahoo! Trip Planner, specifically that the main reason for allowing people to tag trips was the ability to let other users search for trip plans by themes, such as sightseeing, family, beach, adventure, etc. This confused me a little…the only place I’d heavily used tags was within Flickr, and there I assumed that the tags were for my benefit, not the benefit of the community. But then I had a revelation.
Back when I studied economics at the University of Maryland (yes, I studied economics at the University of Maryland), I read a lot of articles published in scholarly journals. At the beginning of each article was an abstract and a list of keywords for that article. I’m not sure why its taken me this long to make the connection, but those keywords are essentially what the Web 2.0 world has dubbed “tags” of today. The value of those keywords was singular – to make sure that the article was associated with the correct disciplines/theories/ideas, and therefore could be found easily by people searching for them.
So tags are keywords! The idea of tags hasn’t been around that long, but the idea of keywords has been around for decades at least. I believe the ancient Egyptians added keywords to their cave drawings. Ok maybe not, but still, why don’t we just call them keywords? It seems like more people would understand it this way. But I digress.
A new site for user reviews, called Viewpoints, recently launched. I think their system of tagging is wonderfully superior to anything else I’ve seen:
and I don’t hesitate to say that it’s very similar to the [very elegant] tagging functionality we came up with in Trip Planner:
The concept is pretty simple: ask specific questions, then suggest the answer. This tagging wizardry has (at least) three benefits. First it allows users to immediately understand what it is we’re looking for. Within Trip Planner, its clear that these are ways to describe your trip, and within Viewpoints they don’t simply ask users to tag themselves; they ask specific questions about who you are, what you do and what you’re intersted in. Second, providing users with a wealth of suggested tags makes the process of adding tags easier, and it makes it more likely that you’ll have a consistent way for other users to find the content. And finally, we’re only suggesting tags. Giving users the ability to create custom tags allows for those unique descriptors to be created and discovered.
Jim
July 19th, 2007
Yes, in fact, the fortunate occurrence of select keywords is what allowed us to use the Rosetta stone as an interpretive tool.
Joshua Porter
July 19th, 2007
Good question. The reason is that keywords and tags differ slightly. Keywords are words that are the key identifier words within a text, used for scholarly purposes by people other than the author.
Tags, applied in a similar way to an item, aren’t just keywords. They’re words applied by the user of the item, not necessarily the author, and they are flexible enough to be used for any purpose.
A good distinction between the two is that keywords should be in the text of the item. Tags, on the other hand, can be anything, and while sometimes contain keywords, they often contain words used in completely different contexts…for example the tag “to-read” is a tag that only means something to a user of content, and would never be a keyword.
Jamie Lewis
July 19th, 2007
I think tags can be generally divided into two categories, keyword tags and context tags. Keyword tags are used to describe the document, photo or music file, where as context tags provide extra information, as Joshua commented above “to-read” is an excellent example of a context tag.
Keyword tags are permanent, they can’t change unless the underlying data changes e.g. tagging a photograph as “mary”, mary will never leave the photograph. Where as context tags can change e.g. “to-read” becomes “read” or “to-respond”
Thanks for this post, its given me a few ideas about my next post.
Sarah
July 19th, 2007
Ah, good point. So “keywords” wouldn’t really work. That made me think of Gmail - I guess the term “labels” was their attempt at making this a more accessible idea (as well as trying to combine the notion of tagging with folders)
Bryce
July 20th, 2007
Echoing Jamie’s sentiment, I think there’s something important about the content vs. context divide: ‘keywords’ nicely sum up what a piece is about, but don’t always get at what the piece is ABOUT (if you get my drift.) I tried to diagrammatically represent this in my Flickr concept map:
http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=58299511&size=l
And, for whatever reason, I recently ran across this nice ‘introduction to tagging’ on the iStockphoto site (written for illustrators to carefully consider their meta-data when submitting files for download.)
http://www.istockphoto.com/illustrator_4.3_metadata.php
Pretty pictures, too!
Idevs » Blog Archive » Directories, Tagging and Desktop Search
July 20th, 2007
[...] One important note about tagging that only really hit me while reading the new face of tagging was that tags can be seperated into two broad categories, descriptive and contextual, the former provides information about the data that has been tagged e.g. in a photo a tag might be the photographer or who is in the photo. Contextual tags however provide information about the item that has been tagged e.g. in a photo a contextual tag might be “to-crop” or “to-edit”. [...]
Directories, Tagging and Desktop Search - Idevs
July 26th, 2007
[...] One important note about tagging that only really hit me while reading the new face of tagging was that tags can be seperated into two broad categories, descriptive and contextual, the former provides information about the data that has been tagged e.g. in a photo a tag might be the photographer or who is in the photo. Contextual tags however provide information about the item that has been tagged e.g. in a photo a contextual tag might be “to-crop” or “to-edit”. [...]