Erik Benson, at his self titled blog, has a post called a concise guide to what I learned at sxsw and etech 2005. In it, among other things, he talks about tags, mentioning that tags are replacements for tedious ontologies. I think he means ontology as a confined vocabulary, rather then just the general concept.

I have resisted the movement to tagging because of the limited utility of searching algorithms that search for words like the term as will as forms of the term. Example I tag a post as "blogging" and you search for "writing online" will you find my post? This could be a problem specifically if my post is about the concepts related to writing online but I tagged it as blogging because that is the format my writing takes, rather then say webpages or hypertext poetry.

- people tag things for many different reasons
- other people want to use tags as a replacement for ontologies
- these other people seem to assume that the first people are tagging things in rational and thoughtful ways
- these (other) people are mistaken

We should treat tags like happy accidents that sometimes appear rational, and which we can draw interesting assumptions out of that will sometimes match our desired outcomes. We should analyze them the same way we analyze clickstream data or other behavioral patterns... assume that it's dirty, that it doesn't map perfectly to our ideal picture of the world, and don't be afraid to throw a lot of it away when aggregating it

I'm still not sold. Though I am watching and thinking about the subject. LOL As with all other issues of life, I reserve the right to change my mind at any time...repeatedly...and without warning.

Erik Benson also writes the 43 Things blog, not to be confused...as I'm sure it regularly is confused with...the 43 Folders blog to which I have previously referred.

Posted by prolurkr at March 22, 2005 08:34 AM

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