I'm just finished an awesome book called Tagging: People-Powered MetaData for the Social Web by Gene Smith.
It sounds like a dry subject, but tagging is really super cool and has massive implications for the design, building and nurturing of online communities. I thought I'd jot down some notes I took straight out of the book so you can see why.
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How tagging works:
1) Tags are multiple ways of finding something
2) Tags are a way to browse
3) Tags are part of a community pool - act as a bridge between personal and community knowledge
4) Tags connect objects to other objects
5) Tags are hooks used to pull information together from other website that use tags, like Technorait, Flickr, Delicious.
Tags by themselves are like a filing system without files - need USERS and RESOURCES to be useful.
Tags can be created from three perspectives:
- Information Architecture - for organizational content
- Social Software - to facilitate group interaction
- Personal Information Management (PIM) - organizing stuff for an individual's use.
There can be friction between these.
Tagging is related to the re-emergence of oral culture online. (Alex Wright)
Tagging is NOT like folders, where you move something from one place (e.g. inbox) to another (folder) - tags allow things to live in several places at once.
Tagging is SOCIAL = personal + collaborative at the same time. Tags show minority viewpoints as well as consensus. (Tag Clouds are a visualization of this).
Value Centered Design = value comes from balancing the goals of the people who create the system (RETURN ON INVESTMENT) with those of the people who use the system (RETURN ON EXPERIENCE).
Motivations for users to tag (ROE):
- ease of use
- to manage personal info
- sharing and collaborating (---> communities of interest)
- fun
- self-expression
Business benefits (ROI):
- to facilitate collaboration
- to obtain descriptive metadata
- to enhance findability
- to increase participation
- to identify patterns
- to augment existing classification systems
- to spark innovation (e.g. data mashups, geodata/geotagging)
THEREFORE:
- tagging must be made easy,
- it must help people manage their info as well as yours
- it must encourage collaboration, play, self-expression.
ALIGN USERS' GOALS WITH SYSTEM'S GOALS.
Tags connect objects together and help disparate users find each other = social experience through common interests.
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I know this is just the bare bones and I could get a lot deeper into this, but I'm wondering if anyone has found "communities of interest" bubbling up from their organization's use of tags? Do you allow user-generated tags?
2 comments:
Maddie, sounds like an interesting read. We are in the early stages of creating an online library for our association. Your post makes me wonder if we should be considering use of bookmarking site as part of our collection process and/or part of our distribution process. Wow, wonder if we should collect the resources at all? We could simply find'em, tag'em and share'em!
Thanks for your description of tagging and its uses, and book recommendation. I'm currently doing a comparison to traditional library catalogs (in the best of worlds, both systems would be used!) In answer to your question, the best use of tagging to create communities is in Diigo. Diigo is the quickest way for me to find people with common interests.
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