Can you teach tagging?
Cliff January 29th, 2008
This is from a Facebook App called Puzzlebee. You can share your photos with friends as puzzles. You can also tag puzzles, but first you have to pass a tagging test.
Bad tag! Bad tag! No no no!
I mean, come on. Isn’t that the point of tagging? That I can tag something as “Fred” if I want my friend Fred to view it? Or that I can create my own shorthand (TBR = to be read)? I do this with tagging, and I don’t consider myself misleading other people, because those tags are created for searching purposes, not browsing purposes.
I could see librarians leaping on this idea of creating tagging tests before users could contribute tags to a catalog. However, rather than improving the user experience, it’ll be one more hoop that we would be creating for users to jump through. Just say NO!
I agree. Making tagging a judgment call will only serve to alienate the casual tagger. I had an idea a year or so ago, for creating a faceting tool that would allow librarians to organize and collect similar tags. The facets would then be shared and would help to connect things that weren’t necessarily originally linked. The original model was meant to exist within a catalog, so that your items were limited to resources, but still pretty wide open content-wise.