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Posts Tagged ‘folksonomy’
Tag and category cleanup
With the announcement that WordPress now realizes the difference between tags and categories, I’m going through my 34 posts to date and re-tagging them and limiting the categories.
The way I see it with my technical writer lens on, categories are broad general topics and I’m hoping my blog will have about a half dozen categories. Tags, on the other hand, are more like index keywords. So I’m re-reading my posts and trying to define categories very conservatively and carefully, but with tags I’m probably going overboard, approaching it like creating an index on an entire book, using any keyword I can find in the title or the text or the headings and making the keyword a tag.
To avoid being the anti-social taxonomist that I can be sometimes, I will keep an eye on what other people using WordPress.com are using for their tags so I can be like them. Apparently not a lot of folks use “techpubs” for their tagging so I’ll probably start using “technical-writing” instead. Another case-in-point of my tendency to use odd keywords for tags - while Michael Cote uses “thekids” in del.icio.us to bookmark links pertinent to what the Net Generation is doing, I would probably chose to tag mine “tehkidz” because I’m a dork that way. 
Twenty-two more posts to go.
The anti-social folksonomist
I’m finding that in del.icio.us I’m using keywords that no one else uses. Does this mean I’m an anti-social folksonomist?
This discovery reminds me that it’s important for findability to have tags that others will use too. On sites where popularity counts, it might be better to match others’ tags depending on what your end goal is - is your goal to categorize for your own easy retrieval later, or to tag so that others can see what you’ve tagged as being similar to their own findings?
For example, I use a tag called “blogthis” for items that have caught and held my interest but I don’t have time to immediately write a blog post about the item. Apparently no one else uses this tag! Or if they are using a “blogthis” tag, it’s those items aren’t shared.
Tagging is so easy, especially the way it’s implemented on sites like flickr and del.icio.us. But what conscious decisions are you making when you select a tag? This article has a good cognitive analysis of the act of tagging. To me, the lovely and freeing part about folksonomies for taxonomy is the decoupling of concerns about “matching” others tags and the ability to have multiple categories with similar meanings.
What does easy tagging mean for indexing professionals? Is it the crowdsourcing of indexing? Or is the printed book still a strong enough meme that a professional index is a requirement for certain media? Or is it a third, hybrid being, with identity and authority tied up in the tag selection?
