Taking a critical look at tagging
Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch has a blog post taking a critical look at tagging and the history of web metadata attempts. He notes that metadata has largely been useless and overly complicated for use in the overall web and argues that tagging has the same problems, one major problem being the lack of a controlled vocabulary. In one of his past articles cited in the post, Sullivan discusses the problems that arose with the meta keywords tag, how it was used to spam search engines and was, thus, subsequently dropped by all of the major search engines.
Part of what apparently motivated Sullivan’s post was a news.com.com.com.com article on the Yahoo!/Flickr deal and the fact that tags seem to be the motivating factor behind the purchase. From the article:
Yahoo itself said that digital photography was secondary to its decision to buy Flickr. More important is Flickr’s technology and founding team who “get it,” said Yahoo spokeswoman Joanna Stevens. “Flickr’s strength are complimentary to Yahoo’s goals for creating next-generation services,” Stevens said.
More discussion on the subject is also taking place in the SEW forums
Personally, I’ve found the technorati tags feature to be very useful, but it still has the same problem with the lack of a controlled vocabulary. For example, on this site I use the tag “library,” as do 62 other technorati blogs, but there are 34 that use the tag “libraries.” While Technorati has a “Related tags” list, “library” and “libraries” aren’t going to show up in one another’s list because folks only use one or the other. How many examples are like this and when will there be any easy and clean solution?