Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
I think the only point at which a user would actually be motivated to
tag something is when they are organizing citations for their own use,
one way or another. When they are saving a citation to their own 'book
bag', or to making a request (saving it to their request list), etc.
By and large, people don't tag just for the enjoyment of tagging, or
to provide useful query words for others. They tag to achieve some
personal goal. "personal value precedes network value”.
(http://bokardo.com/archives/the-delicious-lesson/)
This article argues compellingly that in Delicious, tagging is ancillary
to other activities -- primarily, bookmarking items they want to find
later. This gets back to the idea of making tagging easy to do, building
it into logical workflows, and providing incentives. Those incentives
certainly include findability -- that's why people tag in Delicious --
but they also include other personal motivation -- look at the
reputation system Amazon has built. (Note that reviewing in Amazon works
far better than its tagging, and it's much better thought-out.)
I see Mark Leggott has another post about bookbags -- people build
bookbags for a variety of reasons, and if one could add tags -- well,
that would be delicious (pun intended). For example, I have a Localvore
bookbag to track books I'm interested in about the local food movement
(it would be more useful for me if the bookbag had some history and
allowed me to make personal notes). I wish I could tag it with a slew of
relevant tags.
that motivates tagging, you've got to let the user apply the tags at
the moment of personal use. You can't say, oh, you can tag, but only
after you've checked out the book. Nobody's going to go back to the
catalog to find a book they already checked out to add a tag. Users
find books in the catalog _before_ they've checked them out!
Actually, Jonathan; this is how Netflix works. It's not that its users
"find" the items they've checked out; it's that Netflix pushes these
items under their noses the next time they log in and makes it hard NOT
to rate/rank/review (different from tagging, but still building social
data). This is also true with Amazon resellers and a few other systems.
Note that Amazon provides very subtle vetting... I don't know how they
manage it, but it's obviously reputation-based. Like Wikipedia, the
heaviest reviewers tend to be self-policing.
Then once you've got the personal value there, if you want to achieve
the network value, that's when aggregating tags accross multiple
institutions matters. But if users have got no motivation to tag, no
personal value, they aren't going to do it in the first place. In that
case, those worried about tags 'polluting' the catalog don't need to,
because there aren't going to be any tags there anyway.
Jonathan
A really interesting question is why we even want people to tag. Tim
Spalding (I know, a controversial figure to some, but work with me)
would say it's all about the data. It's not the individual tag -- it's
the power of tags in the aggregate, and the useful data that builds that
helps us deliver better services to our users. Again, without scale,
it's pointless. A system that has a few lonely tags floating around is
worse than a system without any tagging -- the crank tags and the
spelling errors would stand out, and there would be a preponderance of
personal tags to the really useful tags. Scale requires a lot of data --
far more than any one library system could provide.
Jonathan, have you looked at Insurge yet? I know you're interested...
(tempt, tempt...)
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