At long last, we have a new Delicious. Faster, more accessible, and better designed, the redesigned and renamed social bookmarking champion is no longer a vision of the future but an establishment of the present. I’m not going to cover the launch here– if you’d like to read more, check out ReadWriteWeb or TechCrunch’s excellent coverage– but rather, address an issue that’s remained relatively unchanged with the 2.0 iteration: tagging.
Tagging is a cornerstone of Delicious…
It’s safe to say that the tagging plays a large role in the Delicious framework. As one of the main navigation tabs besides “Bookmarks” and “People,” it’s clear the Delicious designers expect tagging to be well-utilized and well-loved.
When tags were released in early 2007, Mashable wondered if users would bother filling in tags. It seems they have, even if they do so grudgingly; Delicious features thousands upon thousands of dutifully-entered tags.
How do the folks at Delicious define a tag? They say:
“A tag is simply a word you can use to describe a bookmark. Unlike folders, you make up tags when you need them and you can use as many as you like. The result is a better way to organize your bookmarks and a great way to discover interesting things on the Web.”
… but it’s not as easy at it sounds
The problem is, nobody agrees on a way to tag. I’ve complained about this before in regards to photo-sharing site Flickr, and the issue is just as pressing with bookmarks as it is with photos. If tagging were solely a private experience, it wouldn’t be as pressing of an issue, but the fact that Delicious encourages public, social tagging means there’s trouble when ‘tagworlds’ collide.
Here are my three main guffs with tagging:
- There’s a lack of a clear standard. If I’m bookmarking an article about tagging, should I tag it as “tags” or “tagging?” Or both? If the word “tag” is in the title, should I omit it altogether? Writers have been concerned about this problem for quite some time now and still no solution has been reached.
- Semantic differences create unnecessary distinctions. If I tag one story with the word “bookmark” and another with the tag “bookmarks,” these two tags get filed away under separate headers when they really indicate the same content. Why should an accidental pluralization complicate the system? Am I really expected to go back and check to make sure all current tags mesh with previous ones?
- Tagging is time-consuming. If I’ve just spent a good deal of time reading an article, interacting on a webpage, or engaging in a discussion, the last thing I want to do is take the time to tag a site. Bookmarking should be fire and forget; rather, it’s a time-consuming endeavor if you want to do things properly.
How do you solve the tagging dilemma? Is keeping things organized via semantic tagging worth your time, or do you find it more of a hassle than its worth? Looking back, I find that tagging within Delicious has actually kept me from being more active on the site, just because I can’t stand the organization style.
I guess that’s why, for guys like us, categories exist.
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Better searching would help with part of the issue. Like Google does, so that it wouldn’t matter if a bookmark was tagged “tag”, “tagging”, “tags”, or any other relevant alternative.
A system for suggesting appropriate tags would help relieve the tedium. Likewise a system for tracking down and correcting redundant tags.
Ah-ha, great thinking, Mark! Those are some excellent suggestions. I know I always enjoy it when programs suggest tags for me– the downside, then, is that there’s little innovation if everyone tags things identically.
And a ‘tag tracker’ would be priceless. Man, you gotta offer these ideas to the Delicious folks!
Thanks for commenting!
Actually, the solution that many educators and I are using is the “tag dictionary” feature in diigo. The Educators Group over there - http://groups.diigo.com/groups/educators has over 500 members and we’re finding using the tag dictionary feature has been great.
We’ve been begging delicious for it, but there is really no one in tuned to our needs to talk to. So, a lot of us just have diigo send our bookmarks to delicious and then just use the tagging standard (with a little folksonomy still in there for good measure) to share bookmarks.
A tag dictionary, Vicki? I haven’t heard of anything like that, I’ll have to sleuth around Diigo a bit to figure out what you’re talking about. From what you’re describing, it sounds a bit like, well, a massive number of categories?
It’s great to hear such a large group is making good use out of tagging. Might as well use whatever tools are best for sharing interesting content!
(Speaking of which, Read/WriteWeb also did a little piece on tag clouds last week, too. Worth taking a look at!)
Actually, here is the information about the group tag dictionary - http://help.diigo.com/How-To_Guide/Groups#Group_Tag_Dictionary — the amazing thing was that when they launched we gave them a list of what we wished delicious would do, and they did it. No, diigo doesn’t pay me. I just needed standards as a teacher and they gave it. Now, it has some limitations like it will truncate a tag that is too long and you can only fit so many, but it will also automatically generate a dictionary from tags that have already been used. It is a cool service and since it sends to delicious, I just totally ignore my delicious account.
It also has a super cool autoposting feature for bloggers, so, I tag a post “education” and it appears on Cool Cat Teacher - I tag it “christian” and it posts on my devotional blog, etc. — some really cool stuff for bloggers.
Let me know if you want an intro to Maggie Tsai, one of the cofounders - she is awesome and listens to people who have suggestions.
Thanks for the link, Vicki! Pretty neat that you were able to be so involved in the process there, and it’s especially nice that it takes all of the Delicious guesswork out of the equation too.
That introduction might be really neat. Why don’t you let me familiarize myself with diigo first so I don’t look like a total newbie!
Thanks for the response!