A Drop In The Stream

When I finally understood what a tag is on the web and that it wasn’t the same as a category I wasn’t much struck by the realization. On a site that does searches, searching for a tag allows for some finer grain connections or stipulative naming – ‘gee-gaw’ might be the name of tool ‘XYZ’ in some part of the country for example. Therefore, being able to search explicitly for the tag ‘gee-gaw’ rather than drilling down through it’s formally recognized tool taxonomy would likely get a user to the exact ‘gee-gaw’ they’re looking for more quickly. That is useful, no doubt but I didn’t get just how challenging and subjective this whole area is until just a few minutes ago when I set about adding tagging to my blog.

The epiphany arrived for me when I realized just how flexibly I could identify almost any of my posts using tags. In the post on Lorelle on WordPress entitled Tags are not Categories – Got It? Lorelle describes some of the undesirable effects of confusing the two. Some of the problems exist at the practical level of handling layout issues. The proliferation of categories (if they’re mistakenly used instead of tags) will create a fiasco of a sidebar navigation panel with so many, finely grained, or insubstantial categories that it is of no use to a reader. On the level of meta-data, tags are supposed to offer another angle of approach to finding something on the web. If there are too many tags then a tag-cloud becomes so large and the elements of it so specific that they offer very little guidance to the desired content. User defined tags and content provider defined tags can result in very different pictures of content and the inter-relationships in within it.

My epiphany is that the subjective nature of tagging means that it can be used as both an editorial and navigation device. For example, if I tag a posted article on Veganism with the tags health and nutrition I am baking an explicit value judgement into my tagging. I’m not simply providing a search tool, an objective data mining taxonomy, rather, I’m ushering a user into my navigational paradigm in which the value judgements behind the linkages can potentially be unexpected. The links themselves can send a message! So a tag cloud can be an interesting adventure into the different ways we understand our experiences. There is some of this wiggle room in categorization too, however, you’d never expect to see a rock categorized under a plant taxonomy structure so there are some logical limits that would catch our attention and likely lead us to downgrade the usefulness of the site.

In another excellent blog on Lorelle’s site entitled Categories versus Tags – What’s the Difference and Which One she highlights some of the usages of tags versus categories and delves into the impact of some of these choices and hints at the future involvement of search engines in making tags understandable, accessible, (perhaps normalized? – my thought). This issue gets to the very heart of how we make the massive amounts of information on the web readily available and comprehensible. If I tag something one way and somebody else tags it differently have we just created a semantic quagmire or a customized experience?

Let me know what you think of the tagging I’ve implemented – I’ve put some ‘thought experiments’ in there to see if they are noticed by anybody. I may not have the traffic yet to make this a meaningful exercise though.