null is not an object

Om Malik posted about the increasing interest in people power vs the power of Google [1]. I think that tags will lose out to automated clustering (such as Vivisimo) in the short term but that doesn’t mean we will not see more players like Wink trying to get a piece of the tagging pie. Not that I won’t give Wink a chance and don’t get me wrong I do think that services like Wink have a place in the blogosphere today but we already have the likes of Technorati and my new favourite Google Blog Search.

The topic of tag utility has been covered quite a bit in the past by the likes of Tim Bray [2] and Stephen Green [3] (both good canucks) and I am sure it will be discussed well into the future! On the whole I have to agree with Tim, and Stephen brings up some very interesting points from his research that should be considered. I will discuss that in a moment.

But first, there are a few issues that I can see with the new emphasis on the old idea of tagging …

• People are lazy. who wants to waste their time rating pages when Google does a _pretty good_ job on its own?
• People who are not lazy (like geeks maybe) cause tagged content to be very skewed to their interest group and therefore it becomes inaccesible to the majority of people.
• There is lots of meta-data (some may even call it “tags”) available to search engines based on page content - so why do more work?
• If I tag a page as “interesting” that is only in the context of what I am thinking at that moment in time. Tags can have temporal/geographic/personal dependence which is something that is not easy to manage with tags today.

For example, a current topic that I am very interested in is the science (or maybe art?) of data binding - ie how to create a binding language that provides rich mechanisms for indirection and how to express it using a declarative / mark-up approach. This is something that is quite difficult to find information about using Google or Yahoo!. Could tagging of content help me find some obscure piece of very relevant and useful information on this topic? If someone has found it before me and tagged it with the pecise tags that I would use for the topic then maybe. However, I’m not convinced [4] and it seems that John Battelle is not either [5].

Here is the thing, people need to look beyond the tag - it is a stop-gap that has been tried many times before (web page keywords?). Places that tags have had some success, as Stephen mentions, are instances where you have defined vocabularies or taxonomies. Content is tagged by domain experts and integrated into a taxonomy at great expense but with great reward (this seems to be a re-occuring theme to me). I am not sure that people using the web want to be constrained like this - yet it is the best way to get value from tagging so that everyone “talks the same language”.

This brings me to a point that I have brought up before [4]. Forget tags. Think semantics. Think Semantic Web [6]. The discussion should not be about the value of tags but about moving towards a richer Web. More on that soon.

References
[1] People Power vs Google - Om Malik, Dec 22, 2005
[2] Do Tags Work? - Tim Bray, Mar 4, 2005
[3] Tags, keywords, and inconsistency - Stephen Green, May 13, 2005

[4] More Tags - Dave Johnson, Dec 14, 2005
[5] Will Tagging Work - John Battelle, Dec 4, 2005
[6] Tagging Tags - Dave Johnson, Dec 1, 2005