How can a network of individuals be encouraged to tag quality resources and help build a useful database of tagged information?
The Web is full of tags. Tagging is a new easy way for people to sort information which has been given a human filter.
We call the keywords which people attach to describe information: tags. We call personal collections of tags: tagclouds, and aggregated tagclouds: folksonomies. We might even venture a name for those who tag frequently: taggers.
This broad investigation of tagging will follow these lines of inquiry:
- What user behaviours exist around tagging?
- Is there an identifiable culture or practice of tagging?
- How might people be rewarded for tagging stuff?
**UPDATE**
- What user behaviours exist around tagging?
People are tagging mostly for their own benefit. However as people use the social aspect of bookmarking services to find additional information from people who share similar interests, some are asking what this all means, both in terms of themselves: proper usage of tags, and others: how can I be a better resource and aid other people’s search? This leads taggers to want to understand their role within the larger web of metadata.
- Is there an identifiable culture or practice of tagging?
Yes, but it is not as well understood as blogging which uses its loose association with journalism to promote itself. Taggers are closer in kind to Librarians. Not very sexy, but then, I doubt they care.
One thing is becoming clear, authors (bloggers, journalists, academics, publishers, etc) need taggers to index and add a layer of human filtration to their writings. Taggers essentially add additional layers of meaning to data using tags which then makes that data useful to someone else.Taggers also play a part in getting that filtered information to that someone else, though this is largely automated by software. There is a value chain (write-tag-publish-tag-read-tag-) which needs to be better understood.
- How might people be rewarded for tagging stuff?
The prime motivator at the moment is to recognise the important work taggers do and to give them a label ‘taggers’ just as bloggers have. The important thing to understand is that taggers view their tagged databases as theirs and are willing to share them but they can’t be bought. It is my hunch that offering any type of reward which asks the tagger to give up their database (in terms of access and control) wouldn’t be successful. It has to be a sharing arrangement where a tagger is paid by the hour for ‘tag gardening’ (more on that later).
Opportunities:
To further investigate how taggers aid the building of the semantic web(s).
To assess whether taggers are important enough to be paid by companies to tag/filter stuff. My hunch is, yes, and that a specialised tagging agency could be created for that very (narrow?) purpose.
