The folks at LibraryThing (where you can keep track of your own library) has done some analysis on tagging: When tags work and when they don't: Amazon and LibraryThing. Not surprisingly, LibraryThing has more tags than Amazon -- it's more fun to tag your own books. "Amazon is a store, not a personal library or even a club. Organizing its data is as fun as straightening items at the supermarket. It's not your stuff and it's not your job."
But what's interesting is that as the number of tags go up, the utility of those tags go up, since you're much less likely to see "single-opinion" tags ("great," "boring," "on my list," etc.). Wisdom of crowds, law of large numbers, and all that. And of course, the more useful tagging is at LibraryThing, the greater the incentive to tag yourself. Virtuous circle ensues!
Movielens, late to the tagging party, tries to get around the low-volume problem by enabling you to vote on tags. Tags that are useful to you get the thumbs up; tags that aren't get the thumbs down. Presumably then the tags that are voted up will be "popular" and then bubble up.
One solution for the "opinion" tag vs. the "useful" tag problem is to embrace it. Just have two different classes of tags. Left-handed tags are reserved for opinions, individuals' list-making, etc. Right-handed tags are for those that "objectively" describe the item. One might have a voting system in place to make sure that tags have the proper "handedness" but hopefully just giving users both options will encourage proper tagging.
"Are you a good tag, or a bad tag?"
Comment #1 :: link :: February 22, 2007 1:29 PM :: homepageI think one of the great things about tagging is that it can serve multiple purposes. In del.icio.us I tag some pages with GTD style tags (@toread, @waiting, etc.), some with content related tags (PHP, anthropology, etc.), some with sharing related tags (an agreed upon tag that all members in a given group will know to look at), and also with tags that are meant just to create RSS feeds (such as links to blog posts where I've left comments). Even the content tags can be broken down into those which are meaningful only to me and those which everyone will understand. In short, I think tagging works because there is no such thing as "proper tagging." The reason we are willing to tag things that "we own" is that we tag them for our own purposes - and only incidentally for everyone else as well.
What really helps ensure certain standards is seeing how other people have tagged the same item. The Del.icio.us firefox extension does this very well, with autocomplete and a list of popular and suggested tags.
Comment #2 :: link :: February 22, 2007 9:11 PM :: homepage
