Why I Love Tagging

Tagging has not been getting much love lately in the circles I travel. Some people mention that they don't like tagging, some don't see the point, some decry the spammers insinuating themselves into tagging, and some just want to do more complicated full-text searching instead of doing single word searching.

I hate to be not cool, but I love tagging. And finally I couldn't hold my shoulder any longer and had to pop out with six reasons I love tagging.

1. It allows for simple searches -- I spend a lot of time writing and talking about the best ways to use many of Google and Yahoo's special syntax. I do that because Google and Yahoo both index billions of pages; narrowing down results often has to be a top priority.

It used to be that you could do more general searches -- searches that were hard to narrow -- in searchable subject indexes like the Yahoo Directory or the Open Directory. But it seems like neither of those resources is nearly as dynamic and useful as it used to be.

So when I need to do more general searches I go to places like Del.icio.us. Simple tag searches there teach me additional words (see reason #6) and sites I can reference in narrowing down my searches in the big oceans like Google and Yahoo. No, tags sites are not the be-all and end-all of my searches. But in some cases they are a critical start.

2. It works beautifully in specialized spaces -- Sites that specialize in a particular topic or particular kind of media seem to benefit a lot from tagging. At Web Search University I used the example of searching Flickr for the tag Google. Ever done that? You'll get some amazing stuff; not just campus shots but screenshots of services. Can you imagine trying to find similar things on a general search engine? Can you imagine what you'd have to wade through if you were searching descriptions? Which brings me to #4.

3. It avoids the irrelevant -- Tags are keywords. Tags are not descriptions or comparisons. Because of that tag searching discards the irrelevant and gets me right to the kind of searches I want. For example, if I do a search for Google on Feedster I'm going to get references to Google, comparisons of Yahoo Mail and Gmail, and other things that I may not want. Doing a tag search on Del.icio.us on Google points me only to Google-related resources with very little irrelevance.

4. It's easy and quick -- It's a lot easier to tag a photograph in Flickr than it is to write a description. I might not be able to get in all the descriptive keywords I want if I had to write a description. But if it's just a case of tossing in all the relevant tags, that's a lot easier, and a lot faster.

5. It helps me learn your language -- When I do a tag search in Del and get a list of related keywords, I'm learning the language of people who are tagging the kinds of resources I'm interested in.

And I don't think we get into that enough, but it's simple: I have to learn your language to find the kinds of things you're finding when you search. Everything has its own language; every topic, perspective, desire, state, need, or interaction contains its own vocabulary. Sometimes as a searcher you find yourself required to research a topic but you don't know the language; you have to learn the vocabulary. You can do that with tag sites because you can see what kinds of tags are grouped together; what tags seem to "hang together" in a folksonomy. Once you learn the language you can, again, take that information to larger data pools like Google and do more thorough searching. But larger data pools like Google are a difficult place to learn new vocabulary because of the huge amount of noise and irrelevance (see #3) that you can get in your searching.

6. It embodies the geist -- The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition defines zeitgeist as "The spirit of the time; the taste and outlook characteristic of a period or generation." But you could extend that definition to any group. Tags make it easy to delineate and examine those groups. For example, I take a list of Google 'blogs and turn it into a tag cloud. I have made a structure that shows me at a glance the concepts being discussed across nine different entities, with the more common concepts and keywords emphasized. Is it perfect? Good Lord no. It's not supposed to be perfect. It is a beginning. It is a changeable entity you can monitor over time.

Another example is Cloudalicious, at http://cloudalicio.us . Cloudalicious allows you to provide the URL of a site that's been included in Del.icio.us, and see the popularity of different tags with which it's been indexed. If you perform this search with Feedster.com you'll see something really dramatic -- RSS as a tag has lost a lot of power over the last six months or so, while blogs and search remain strong words. People are associating Feedster more with search and blogs, and less with RSS. Why? Is RSS getting less popular, or is it so ubiquitous that it's becoming transparent? Ya got me; that's the subject for a lot more research and another essay.

What words are people using? What are they thinking of when they find particular resources? Words disclose what is important to a tagger, what they want to remember something by. I can't express enough how critical that is to me as a searcher, because I will later have to use those words or similar words if I want to explore that territory. As a Web wrangler, it should be important to you, because you will know to describe your site with those words (if it's appropriate) so you will be found in the big data oceans of Google and Yahoo.

Tagging is not perfect. Absolutely not. Tagging is not the only searching method. I believe it is complementary to other searching methods, like full-text searching. Tagging is not invulnerable to spammers, though there are aspects of it that make it easier to avoid spammers. (Like using Oishii and limiting your tag browsing to sites that many many people have tagged.) Tagging is one more searching and organizing method, one I believe is useful and valuable.

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