This could also be tagged with the name of the person who wrote the link so the visitors could find discussions involving that person.

For how I do things, my tag cloud is at my name’s link.

Note the tags with [name topic], such as “obama cabinet”. Anyone who sees that should realize right away what it involves. And, someone looking for specific Obama information can scan the tags starting with his name for subtopics. Note also the tags about themes, such as “mean spirited”, which refers to an “argument” some people make. And, click a tag like “bill richardson” to see how I make some sense of large numbers of posts: many of the lists with a large number of posts are preceded by a summary linking to individual posts.

(Note: that doesn’t represent all the content at my site because I switched from MT to Drupal a couple months ago and only a fraction of thousands of posts is tagged. There are also a few hundred tags that aren’t shown; I need to figure out how to show lots of tags.)

Tags are about throwing things at the wall and letting analysis and algorithms help surface implicit structures or relations.

And, yes, the semantic issue of “chinese” the language vs “chinese” the food vs “chinese” the people is a long standing one. Single tags don’t solve this and tagging in general kind of shrugs on the issue—though tag intersections involving many tags help disambiguate intended meaning. (ie. chinese+food, chinese+language)

About categories and structured hierarchies, I never mentionned to have to pick up one unique category. My goal is to be able to have hierarchieS. You could imagine a system where one tags “chinese”

1. meant a human chinese person
2. or meant the written language.

Structures are useful. As I said, I’m not against tags, I’m just for a better use of tags. I believe that plugging SKOS would be a very easy way to leverage the power of tags by letting people doing their own personal ontologies if they need it. :)

So the summary instead of a flat system, I want a hierarchical system, a graph without destroying the flat system.

I’ve been using a lot of tags on Delicious over a relatively long time, so they seem very useful to me.
Delicious encourages…

(Annoyingly, I can’t find a link that shows that well. There’s my bookmarks tagged ‘tagging’, I suppose. I’ve only just noticed this has related tags- that’s a nice touch I’d never really spotted.)

On a side note, I love machine tags in Flickr, mainly because they’re hidden from the user by default. (They’ve got a lot more useful now that there are specialised methods in the API, too.) I mused on Twitter last week that neither Delicious nor a third party has done anything with the loose convention of via: or cite: tags that some people use. One day…

I tend to use Delicious tags to associate a bookmark with a thread of my thinking (which is very useful), and I use a combination of search and tags to find things. But on Flickr, I like looking through tagged photos, and I like looking through groups even more. I search to find old photos, often finding a picture because of the tags on the photo. Both Flickr and Delicious work very well for me.

Tags are interface; the “meaning” of each tag is de-emphasized. Compared to hierarchical structures, they’re easier, messier, more-used, more fun. They’re flexible – they’re personal.

Tags on Delicious are collective; tags on Flickr are collective (except when you tag another person’s photos); folksonomy implies collaborative.

You can learn more details about our approach in the proceedings of the 2008 Workshop on Human Computer Information Retrieval:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/ryenw/hcir2008/

You wrote about another service, but I didn’t—I’m writing about tags on Delicious. I don’t know what the thing they call tags looks like on that other unnamed service.

This is part of the reason behind my mild disdain for the term “folksonomy”: Delicious didn’t introduce tagging to start a best practice for Web 2.0 at large—tagging was introduced as a site feature for Delicious. Attempts to clone that feature elsewhere have been uneven in results, despite having had a term coined and a body of hype spun around it.

Tagging is like a salt water fish that lots of people thought was pretty and they started trying to stick in fresh water tanks. I don’t think it thrives everywhere people have tried to stick it and not everyone who’s tried to clone tagging has gotten all the important parts right.

On Flickr, I’ve asserted that tags aren’t that useful. Machine tags like geo tags are a big exception though. Otherwise, they have a wealth of other tools for finding things beyond tags, whereas on Delicious they’re the only game in town.

I guess my main point is this: In my experience, tags work. On Delicious. Where they’re largely agreed to have been cloned from. Elsewhere, I think there have been transcription errors and misinterpretations that give the concept a dubious reputation.

I’m not sure what you mean about tags being not really efficient compared to other methods. Tags are a way to get people to provide metadata useful in emergent classification that would otherwise have not been supplied at all. I think they’re efficient at that.

Many people just punt when faced with sorting a new resource into a formal category or folder structure. I suppose that filters out all but the conscientious, leaving better quality results. Is that what you mean?

I assume that many others use tags much like I do—especially the people bookmarking things I find interesting. On Delicious, something akin to lightweight communities emerge based around bottom-up tags.

I am no library scientist—but, if you’ve got a community with a collection to organize, I don’t think you really need tags. That community probably already has a notion of categories worth extracting in a more formal top-down process.

As for repeating the study, I probably won’t be the person to do it. But, for a quick example that I’d suggest is par for the course, take a look at the bookmarks for the article in question.

Of the 18 bookmarks, 10 have notes. That page only shows the most common title, but I’d be surprised if any of the 18 have a title other than “Do Tags Work?” That leaves the tags. Of the top 10 tags, only one appears in the title (“tags”). The word “folksonomy” appears in none of the descriptions. There’s also “socialsoftware” used 3 times, which appears neither in title or description, nor in the original article itself. I think this shows better use of tags than the example used from Flickr.

That’s not a bad thing – those are good features that wouldn’t necessarily work for Delicious. And if they would work for Delicious, someone somewhere is probably emulating them with specially-formed tags to varying degrees of success. Eventually we might have discovered those uses and wrapped a feature around them. (see also: for:* and system:media:*)

Actually, one area where I think Flickr has done better with tagging is in machine tags. There was some disagreement about that even on the Delicious team—pitting it against simplicity of tags—but I thought there was something there worth exploring.

Your readers might enjoy an analysis of how I use Delicious.

But let’s dig a bit further what is she saying and what you are saying. I have too tagged a lot of stuff with another service similar to del.icio.us. The result is that no, it is not useful to find something quickly, and I would even go further that I don’t even find my own stuff. What I do though on a regular basis is to reduce my own stuff by changing the tags for a set a of pages for example if there are économie, economie, economy, business, I might finally reduce it to one tag “économie”. What I would really wish is that I could do a hierarchy of these. For example sometimes I tag Japan and Tokyo, what I wish is that in my own hierarchy when I tag Tokyo, the system assumed Japan.

On Flickr it really depends on what we are looking for, but I’m using flickr for finding images for specific location and for specific creative commons licenses. In both cases, these metadata depends on an ontology (taxonomy, structured schemas, $ORGANIZATIONSYSTEM)

geolocation… the ontology is the map, a well defined system where you can pinpoint an image somewhere and get the real lat/long values.

licenses… a controlled vocabulary of different type of licenses.

The debate is not about “do tags suck” but do they work? And indeed they are not really efficient compared to other methods. It’s cool they exist, but they should not be here to justify that ontology sucks either. Every community which is in a need of achieving a specific repetitive task comes one day or the other to structured data organization.