If you're subscribed to the RSS feed, you've no doubt noticed the tsunami of new del.icio.us links. Yesterday I decided that my previous tagging system wasn't working. I had too many tags and too many random links to too many articles I'd long forgotten about. As a result, my tag cloud was simply too confusing and I'd just go back to Google for what I was looking to find.
So I went scorched earth on my del.icio.us account and started over with a fresh and lean set of tags that I find more useful to me and how I want to think about things. I also discovered Sci-Fi Hi-Fi's free, open source app Cocoalicious for Mac OS X, which makes tagging a breeze. And yes, I know there are a number of great Firefox extensions out there for del.icio.us. I love them all, but wanted to play with something a bit more full-featured and smoothly integrated with the Mac OS UI.
Please feel free to check my del.icio.us page, as I have a lot of great lists of applications, tutorials, and other stuff that I find of useful reference.
del.icio.us/NotAboutTech
All this got me thinking...
I love tagging, but it has its drawbacks. I not convinced that more tags = better, at least in some cases. Take for example content that is already rich in text. What good is tagging if it causes analysis paralysis as I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking of what tags I should use to describe the content? At what point do the tags start to make locating the content I seek more difficult and time consuming as compared to just doing a quick search? What help is tagging when later I have to wade through a pile of tags to try to find the content, hoping that the tags I used awhile back will still resonate with me now? I know some of you are thinking that the value of having lots of tags is so that you don't really have to remember anything specifically about the content, but I'll argue that having too many tags is akin to the paradox of choice as described by Barry Schwartz in this TED Talk.
Why add more tags when I can just do a quick search for the keyword or phrase I'm thinking of, which in the end may or may not be reflective of how the content was original tagged (by me or someone else)? In these cases, I'll argue that a focused set of tags, perhaps no more than four or five, is most useful, at least for me.
Of course, I'm the kind of person who, when on a shopping trip and asked to get trash bags, will spend 30 minutes evaluating the prices, benefits, and features of every trash bag brand and variety at a store like Wal-Mart. Give me the same task at a smaller Mom-and-Pop shop with only a couple choices, and I'm out of there in only a few minutes. At first glance, having more choices seems better; however, was I more satisfied with my purchase at Wal-Mart than at the Mom-and-Pop? Chances are that in fact, there isn't really that much of a difference, other than I wasted 30 minutes of my life. Your mileage may vary.
Although I argue against the overzealous tagging of textual content, I make no argument against tagging of content such as images, video, music, and other items with little if any textual content. Two perfect examples of the value of tagging are the Library of Congress' photostream and the UMW Centennial photostream, both on Flickr. Google's image search also works well, but functions by analyzing the text on the page adjacent to the image and other means. Individual images, which have been scanned from original photographs, often have dozens of tags that describe various aspects of each image in a level of detail no arbitrary classification Classification could ever hope to achieve. So, in these cases, the more tags, the more accessible and thus valuable the image becomes.
In my own experience, I've spent some time browsing around the various tags at the Library of Congress' photostream just to see what comes up. I've never been to the Library, but even if I had, there's no way I'd be able to literally immerse myself in such a dazzling volume of photographs. In one fell-swoop, the Library changed the playing field for scholars and students of history, ethnography, visual communication, and many other fields. Who'd want to read a boring textbook with a few soulless stock images when they could take a trip on over to the Library of Congress' photostream and really see history in all its glory...and infamy? What educator could possibly communicate the importance of documenting history in photographs using bland, noncontroversial images approved by a committee of schoolboards and textbook publishers, when they could point students to see history come alive in all its decrepit ugliness and radiant beauty?
And all this is absolutely free and available 24/7.
It's no wonder history is thought to be so boring.
Anyway, before the ability to tag images (and other multimedia content), it was difficult to decide where to categorize such content, especially in non-digital form. An item of multimedia, even digital, can only be in one place. In order to find something you had to know what you were looking for. Serendipity was hard to come by, at least without putting in a lot of time and effort. More importantly, the issue was -- and still is -- about who gets to decide how to categorize something. That is, how I may choose to classify something based on my particular context of knowledge and experience could be very different than how you may classify something.
Librarians are trained to do help organize information and assist us in locating what we want to find, and they do all of this very well (Credibility Note: My Mother is a Librarian). The organization of content, using primarily the Dewey Decimal Classification, has served us well as a solid, logical, scaleable, and expandable system, at least for printed and other physical materials. Unfortunately, even the venerable DDC is extremely limited (dare I say archaic?) when compared to what's available today.
Nevertheless, Dewey, nor our esteemed librarians could ever see the world how you or I see and experience it. While it's hard to disagree with basic classification systems that provide us with a reasonable starting point, add to the mix hundreds or thousands of people who see the world in different ways and the value of a traditional classification system quickly disintegrates.
Put it this way: Classifications matter to those who know what they are looking for and to those who have the knowledge (read: power) to decide where to put something; tags matter to people who may not be quite sure what they're looking for (i.e., they'll know it when they see it), and who may not agree with how someone else chose to describe something. In other words, I can't just go into a library and decide that I don't like where a librarian chose to shelve a book based on the Dewey Decimal Classification. It's not feasible to think that I can remove a book from the shelf and re-shelve it in a location I think it should be in, Melvil Dewey and all his "crazy" ideas be damned! Of course, I could be "nice" and leave the book where it is on the shelf, but stick a new label on the spine that indicates other areas where the book should go and/or other ways to describe the book (Hacking Dewey?) but I'd imagine that would draw the ire of any librarian in sight, especially my Mother!
The beauty of tagging, as compared to traditional classification systems such as Dewey's, is that if someone doesn't agree with how something has been tagged, or just thinks that the item could be described in a different way (or ways), he or she can simply add a new tag or two, or as many as he or she sees fit. What's more, tagging doesn't really care where something is actually located. That is to say that with traditional classification systems, location is everything. With tagging, the actual location doesn't matter. After being tagged a couple times, suddenly the item exists both in its current "location" and simultaneously somewhere completely new. It's almost like the act of tagging breaks (at least metaphorically) the idea that a single object cannot occupy two different locations in space at the same time (unless of course we're talking subatomic particles and quantum mechanics, but that's a different post). I guess a tagged object is kind of like an electron. Once tagged, a single digital object can exist -- or be located -- in as many different virtual places as there bytes to form it and tags to describe it. Try that with Dewey's Classification and you're liable to disrupt the entire space-time continuum (at which point this conundrum wouldn't really matter...), or at the very least get kicked out the library for the rest of your life.
