It was interesting to read this report from CNET on a meeting to discuss how to improve tagging. Underlying the meeting was a common understanding that tagging as it currently stands is not as useful as it could or should be. The main reason for this lack of usefulness, according to the participants, is the lack of context for a particular tag. The concluding sentence of the report states:
“…it is easy to imagine that a year or two from now, everyone will know what tagging is because it will just work.”
I found this report interesting for two reasons. First, it acknowledges that tagging has problems. I find that encouraging. Second, it is interesting because the discussion was unable to reach any recognizable solution to the lack of usefulness of tagging. The concluding statement above is really simplistic, in my view, and points once again to the intellectual vacuum in which the discussions are taking place (see Tim Spalding’s excellent commentary on this in response to one of my previous posts on this topic). Why oh why does noone mention or think of library cataloging? Maybe it’s because we have historically been anything but transparent in explaining and making sense of why libraries arrange information the way they do to our users. Also libraries continue to be pigeonholed as repositories and maintainers of a certain kind of information only and therefore aren’t even on the radar of people’s minds when it comes to the task of organizing or making sense of digital information.
[Updated 3/12/2006: Just found a link on the You're It! blog to notes on the session mentioned in the CNET article, including a link to a Flickr photo set. Good stuff!]
