Standardizing tagging, tags
With everyone adding tagging to their web applications, blogs and searches, it would be nice to see some sort of standardization. For example, I was looking at the Feedster’s top 500 blogs the other day. They have a tag cloud on the page for an easy way to find the blogs that you’re interested in. Well, I noticed several variations for the same thing like: web2.0/web20; startup/startups; pr/pr, ; geek/geeks; foreign/policy/foreignpolicy (I think you get the picture). Another problem I see with tagging and specifically, with companies like Technorati, are misspelled words. As for myself, I’m not the best at spelling, and I’m pretty sure I, too, have tagged some of my posts with misspelled words. It happens, I know, but unless someone comes up with a way to standardize tags it’s going to keep compounding itself to a much bigger problem. I noticed that Del.icio.us has added a “recommendation†tool to its service which is a great idea. I would like to see other companies do this as well. This way, when you search for web+2.0, you will get the results that you’re looking for and not have to search for web20 and web2.0 as well. If people are going to continue to use tags as a way to organize and find information then, I think, web applications should come up with a way to standardize the tags.
technorati tags: tags, web2.0, web20, business, favorites , feedster , Del.icio.us
Amen brutha!!!!!
The whole history of the internet has been that same story. Luckily with groups like WC3 it should just get better.
Hi there,
I’m the author of the Feedster 500 and I was just having the same thought honestly (I saw “tech” and “technology” and my little fingers itched to change that but I wasn’t sure if it was acceptable in a “folksonomy”. Good question tho — I’m going to blog this issue and link back to you and see what others think.
Thanks!
Scott
Doesn’t Web 2.0 represent concepts of decentralization and self-organization in site design? With tags, users create an ontology out of nothing and a system eventually emerges. This happens whether you tag your own content (blogs, Flickr) or you’re tagging others’ content (the new Amazon feature). Part of the benefit of such a system is that no central authority has defined what those tags should be.
Compare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web. Folksonomies, though messy, have flourished because of their lack of rigid ontology. Of the current Hot Tags in Flickr (sausages, cellsignal63, mobilife, contextwatcher, adventures, lenstagged), how many could have been predicted beforehand and then managed? How many thousands of words would need to be defined into fixed tags just to resolve the problem of synonyms that you describe?
I’m not saying it can’t be done, these are just several of the reasons why it hasn’t yet been done.