... yet such heated emotions!
For just about every person who loves the process,
we can usually find someone who hates it. In a blog post quite explicitly titled
I still
hate tagging one blogger explains:
But usually, I want stuff “like” or “similar” to my
words. Search engines know variations on words to try to give my search more
breadth. Or, I don’t know what terms are appropriate, so I look for other terms
in the content, read those findings, and learn the proper vocabulary as used
by experts in that field.
But that’s now how tagging systems work. Instead, you have to know the terms
up front to find anything. Using tagging systems to find stuff means typing
in every possible variation of the terms you can think of. This is fun for browsing,
but silly for research or answering questions. Note that every popular “tagging”
system, to date, has been for consumer fun stuff (flickr, etc.) and not for
real knowledge management.
This blogger sees tagging as a means of creating "walled gardens", meaning
that what's inside may be nice, but that it's closed off from others, not really
accessible to others. Others have made this point. One
columnist I often read (who doesn't hate tags) writes:
Bloggers seek out the tags that are related to their interests, they quote each other, they establish a community, and that community is in a continual process of weeding out those who aren't true believers.
The first quote suggests that this problem stems from the technics of the system,
while the other seems to think that when we refer to the social web, we're not
necessarily continually expanding, but, as we attempt to define ourselves, closing
ourselves off as well.
Go to: But you can, you can!