Daryl
posted a bit on Wesley Chrusher's (aka Wil Wheaton) take on flock, and the impression of tags. Tagging is very Web 2.0, and that's a shame. Web 2.0 is seen as something for the digital elite, and while I agree with that general feeling, some things have sifted out of the sledge of use.
Tagging is best looked at as a replacement for keywords and searching. Keywords imply a set list of choice, and this list is never complete. Tagging allows the content creator to decide at creation time what the tags should be. As Daryl notes, there is a draw back here of keeping your tags consistent. Did you use the tag mother or mom last post? This problem can be over come by display recent and popular tags in the editing UI, but that would still leave out the rare tags. So why press on with tags?
The number one reason is the ease of the reader to find related content. Full text searches often yield too many results, and many results are not really accurate. This is fine for Google, but not for a blogger website. More to the point, it is a second step required that many to most will not do. A list of tags with the content allow the reader to one-click jump to highly accurate results.
Tags displayed with content is one method, a second use for engaging the reader has been tag clouds. These are the lists you see of tags, that normally have a count beside them or use font size to indicate how much content shares that tag. Here is where tags are not fully used, and have far greater potential than a search or keyword. These clouds can go beyond simple popularity and into relationships between content. What tags are often related to other tags? What tags exclude other tags? In short, what is the social networking of the content though the tags?
As tags apply to more and more things, it becomes an interesting question. The driving reason for my current blog redesign project, ViNull, is to explore this question. By combining blog post tags with my flickr tags, tossing in link tags of sites I read and for fun, adding in tags of books, movies and music I like; what will the resulting tag network say about me? Will it allow readers to explore parts of my site that interest them with ease - parts they may not have known existed otherwise?
It may sound like a bit much, but it's all conceptual. Very little math and code is involved to make a tag system. For a little bit of input, much is gained.
Posted By Mike On Friday, March 17, 2006
Filed under blog flock |
Comments (2)
Daryl
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Friday, March 17, 2006
4:51:00 PM
Completely agree, obviously. Tag clouds, it turns out, are pretty routinely ridiculed (much more so than tags themselves) by the anti-web-2.0 crowd. I find them pretty useful, though. It's a quick visual way for me to see what I'm blogging most about. One of my sisters-in-law gave me a hard time a few months back because the "tech" tag in my cloud was a lot bigger than the "baby" tag. I've since blogged a lot more about my baby. If your tag clouds become dynamic (ie, shading showing atrophy of tags that you haven't used in a while) and begin to relate content across media, they can be a useful visual aid.
Gabriel
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Monday, March 20, 2006
9:40:00 PM
I'm too lazy for tagging.
That is all.
