On 12/2/05, joshua schachter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> This begs a distinction between "proper" and "improper" tagging.
Tags are a memory aid, decided upon by the person doing the
remembering. If some other person with intentions other than recall
choses the tags, then they are indeed improperly chosen.
If tags were *only* "memory aids," I don't think there'd be any reason not to make all posts private, right?...
Tags also aid both communication / sharing, and search as well.
To wit, I may have a convention, together with some friends, to tag things of common interest "MIT econ XXX," say, where XXX might be a course number. Alternatively, someone with an interest in things "Tahltan" - such as myself! - may browse
http://del.icio.us/tag/Tahltan for things they wouldn't have known or thought to search for.
You don't consider either of these uses of tags improper, do you?... Or do you see this as "just a semantic issue?" What I am calling aids to "communication / sharing," and "search," you are calling "memory aids?..."
Btw, I don't mean to suggest that I don't think there are any good reasons to restrict those without a user's ID from suggesting tags for that user. I'm just still not clear on exactly what those reasons would be.
A person reads an article about some subject and tags it as such. The
publisher is likely to be much more general because they want that
that link to show up in more places if at all possible.
There may be many motives for wanting a link to show up in more places, some of them altruistic.
E.g., I may read an especially inspiring piece about work being done to address indigenous poverty in Canada. Wanting to share this piece with people who share my interest in strategies for reducing poverty among aboriginal peoples, but who may think of their interest in different terms, I may tag my post not only with "indigenous poverty Canada" - as a "memory aid" - but also "aboriginal native american first nations," etc...., in order to make it accessible to others who may use different language to say the same thing. Others may or may not appreciate this - although I'm not quite sure in what cases (they couldn't easily avoid) this practice would really trouble them - but I certainly appreciate it when others, very often unknown to me, do the same "for" me, as it were.
(Similarly, I may also tag this post "NativeAmerican FirstNations," etc....)
From my perspective, there may be many, very good reasons to tag very liberally; and so facilitating liberal tagging actually strikes me as a Good Thing, not a Bad Thing.
I thus think that allowing this feature would lower the quality of
the system.
Maybe.
Thanks for sharing your views on this, Joshua.
Matthew
> One thing that's impressed me is how variable people's tagging
> practices are - leaving me unsure as to what "improper" tagging
> would look like.
>
> Arguably, allowing publishers to tag their stuff would decrease
> tagging creativity, but it might increase the user base, too, which
> could increase creativity....
>
> Interesting. This is only part of it for me - and probably the
> lesser part.
>
> I value del.icio.us at least as much as a way of finding things I
> didn't know to look for - i.e., as an alternative to search - as I
> value it as a mnemonic tool.
>
> Fair enough.
>
> But for the record, the context in which this question arose was
> NumSum.com. I wanted to post a spreadsheet I had developed to my
> own del.icio.us account, and was surprised when their "[Post] to
> del.icio.us" link didn't inherit the name or tags I had given the
> 'sheet.
>
> Theoretically, I could write a little Greasemonkey script to
> rewrite these links with my own username, title and tags - which I,
> frankly, would prefer to include, whether I'd written them myself
> or not, at least in this context - but my _javascript_ chops just
> aren't up to snuff, even for such a relatively simple project.
> Alas....
>
Well, at the very least, the publisher CAN supply the title of the
document...
Joshua
--
joshua schachter
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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