Tags: Uncategorized
Frankly, that’s splitting hairs. The notion of ‘tags’ has done 3 things:
- Given us an excuse to lauch websites without a pre-defined categorization schema, and allow that schema to grow and change over time.
- Made it acceptable for things to live in multiple categories.
- Gotten completely out of hand.
For me, there’s not difference between categorization and tagging – especially if something can belong to multiple categories.
“Tags” are good for 2 things:
- Making it easy to describe things that computers have a hard time parsing from audio, video, or images; i.e. “my dog”, “yummy cake”, “blue shirt”.
- For text – including things that shouldn’t, couldn’t, or weren’t included in the text – i.e. resturants with bad services. Tagging with the same words that are included in the copy is a complete bonehead move.
One Comment
I think the distinction between tagging text and tagging primarily non-text material is an interesting one, as providing useful (i.e. non-obvious) tags for text material usually requires deeper thinking. The cost-benefit ratio is much lower for images. Flickr works so well because of both the size of the user base and the ease and fun of photo tagging.
Even though practice may have blurred the lines between categories and tags, I think the distinction might be a useful one to preserve. There are systems in which you want to enforce non-overlapping sets in certain facets. This is what I think of when I think “categories.”