David Beach's Blog

My Web 2.0, Tagging, and Starting a Link Blog

I've decided that I'm going to start a link blog of some sort. Right now I splice in my My Web 2.0 links into my feed, but I don't like how it clutters up my posts. I like sharing the links I find though, and have gotten a few emails to confirm that I should continue, but not in this feed.

I'm still looking into how I will populate it. There are several options besides writing my own code.

Currently, I use Yahoo! My Web 2.0 and stitch together that feed with this one using feedburner. But My Web is not convenient, and I'm starting to not like many of the features. First, it' slow. It takes several long seconds for the pop-up to appear with the interface loaded. This is very frustrating.

I should say that it may appear that I'm being a little harsh on Yahoo! lately. I mean, I do work for this company and they've done so much for me, but that's precisely why I am critical. I care very much for this organization and site. I want us to be as successful as possible. So my feelings about the user experience are voiced from that perspective.

Back to My Web 2.0 and social bookmarking. Another thing that I don't particularly care for with My Web and many other social bookmarking services, including del.icio.us, is the recommended tag feature. My Web is probably the worst offender because they make it so easy, but this kind of thing seems antithetical to what tagging and the concept of folksonomy creation is all about.

Suggesting tags based on other users behavior can foster groupthink. Tagging personal objects should be just that... personal. At least the classification part. If a natural pattern emerges out of that with the group, then terrific, but don't recommend tags based on that behavior. It will only add to the already difficult task of recall.

Recall is the ability to go back and actually find the site or object that you saved and tagged in the first place. There is not one service that makes recall easy. It seems that once you have saved and tagged the bookmark you can easily forget about it. It gets lost in the pile of all the other bookmarks you've saved. That's supposed to be the benefit of tagging; a way of categorizing your many and various objects in a manner that is most meaningful to you. But the tag structure can become unwieldy fairly fast. You then need to start tagging your tags; or categorize your tags which are categorizing your bookmarks. Things fall apart.

Unless you are very disciplined about how you tag your objects or bookmarks, it's easy to run into recall difficulties. There is no simple way to prioritize objects or give preference to them if you need to. Search then becomes the default recall application. But with My Web and other social bookmarking sites, searching seems like an afterthought. For the mainstream user, the benefit of social bookmarking services becomes more ambiguous.

So look for my link blog soon. I hope it will only add to the confusion and noise of what site you should visit next. :) The din is only getting louder that's for sure.

A Little Post On Tagging

I got my badge and went to work on some stuff this afternoon. I have my bearings now. Austin is a great place. My favorite thing about it so far is the soundtrack. Everywhere I go, good music is playing. A sandwich shop, coffee place, in the cab. They understand music here.

I was at a pre-SXSW party tonight. The usual suspects were there. Andy, Leonard, and Gordon; Scott Beale, Jesse James Garrett, and other now familiar faces. I met Thomas Vander Wal there as well. I have seen his name around and it was good to finally put a person to the user ID. We spoke for a long time about all sorts of things, as he's very big into folksonomy (ok he created the word) and social networks.

I was going to email Thomas about this, but I thought I'd write about it here instead to lure him in... we spoke a bit about Yahoo! Shopping and the tagging of products. We have thought about this at Yahoo! and have discussed it at length. It's my feeling that our users are not ready for the concept of tagging a product object yet. And since products are already classified it would take time for people to think beyond that to submit meaningful tags. We have enough noise on our site already. Thomas understood, but he sees value in the idea. He gave Amazon and their tagging efforts as an example. He said he tagged Adam Greenfield's new book Everyware with the term "ubicomp" because ubicomp is short for "ubiquitous computing" and that's the subject of the book. Okay that's good. That makes sense. But here's my problem, and it took me from the time I left the party until now to think of this... Up until now, tagging has been used to label and define personal objects. My photos, my links, my blog, etc. I do it for me and me alone, not really for the benefit of anyone else. The fact that it does benefit others is a nice after-effect, but it's not the reason I tag. Nor is it the reason most tag. If people tag at all, it's to put the object that they are tagging into their own personal classification or context.

This is why we see "personal" tags on Amazon products. These product objects do not belong to the individual, so to put the object into a personal context, the individual tags it with a personal term. Usually it's a person's name or a note to themselves like a simple classification. They use it as a shopping or wish list. Here are some examples.  1. 2. 3. You can see that the iPod is tagged with words such as "ipod" "iPod" "me wantie" and "katy".

This may not always be the case, and I expect that advanced computer books on Amazon fair better than most other products, but it's certainly a trend worth commenting on and the main reason why Yahoo! Shopping has not implement product tags. Just some food for thought... Am I off on this Thomas?

Here's an idea that is sort of related... tagging yourself. Funny. Again... it's about defining your own object.