Then each went to his own home

I’m very happy that a recent post titled «Tag history and gartners hype cycles» stirred up a discussion in the
folksonomy-blog-space that got some people musing about the state of tagging:

Paolo Valdemarin:

4 years later I’m still wondering when will we get some truly advanced tagging tools.
Where are all these tools to manage all my tags (on Flickr, on del.icio.us, on technorati, in my RSS reader, on my blog, etc), to help me organizing them, to allow me to gain more advantages from tagging? (maybe they are somewhere and I simply have not found them yet…)

Matt Mower:

I have been surprised, that [...] the state of the art in tagging seems firmly wedged in 2003. Surprised because there seemed [...] to be a momentum building in the use of tagging

David Weinberger:

Tagging like it was 2002

Thomas Vander Wal:

In the consumer space thing have been stagnant for a while, but in the enterprise space there is some good forward movement and some innovation taking place
[...]
While there are examples that tagging services have moved forward, there is so much more room to advance and improve. As people’s own collection of tagged pages and objects have grown the tools are needed to better refind them.

Vander Wals post is very very insightful and worth a read: He sums up the tagging history and expresses a few brilliant ideas how to proceed.

The delicious lesson – revisited

The big question remains: Why is tagging stuck?

My suggestion is that we may rethink the delicious lesson: Not in terms of “is it true that personal value precedes network value?” but in terms of “what is the real benefit of the users?” or in other words: “How can we design the itch that causes users to generate valuable metadata?”

Recently I talked with Cédric Huesler, a coworker of mine about his use of del.icio.us: Instead of using delicious for storing his bookmarks for later retrieval he stores them to exchange links with strangers. Indeed he has 19 regular consumers of his bookmarks, 7 of these users he is consumer as well.

He doesn’t store his personal bookmarks at all. He can recall from memory where or how he found a certain website and goes back to his google history.

There are just a few entry points into new information on the web: there is Google, feed aggregators or frontpage sites. When there are good search utilities in those tools who needs bookmarks? I must confess that searching at those entry points feels more natural to me than remembering the exact tag I used.

Let’s put it straight: Using tags to find my bookmarks later just doesn’t work. I give up. And no, it’s not just the lack of good tools that help me going through my bookmarks to reorganize them. I won’t do that for all my 3444 bookmarks. And no, this won’t be solved with better tools to refind my items. What do you want to throw into the mix? Fulltext search and time based drill-down? This has nothing to do with tags.

So, we might have to rephrase the users motivation to tag, as I don’t think Joshua Porter was right when he wrote:

in order to gain more personal value, they use tags to be able to find their bookmarks later

I’m not yet at the point where I could correctly rephrase that statement, but I think Cédrics approach in using tags not for personal recall but for publishing is worth a thought. The value therein is close to the value of blogging: You get attention and you communicate. And that’s what the web is about, isn’t it?

This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Del.icio.us, History, Tags. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.