Tagging: The latest fad

[jameydee]

You know what? Tagging sux.

I'm ranting because I've been watching the rise of tagging over the last 5 or 6 years. In the instructional design world, my former profession, the DoD is convinced that each learning unit should be tagged and then a student should be able to do a search on a tag (say, laser maintenance), pull up a dozen (or a hundred dozen) matches for laser maintenance, and have everything he needs to learn about laser maintenance appear in front of him. In short, a search engine for lessons.

Sorry, but you cannot assemble a cohesive learning experience out of pieces and parts, that's not teaching, that's just firing scattershot at a target.

And at the most fundamental level, a tagging system is only as good as its taggers. Garbage tags in, garbage results out. I know this because I've seen people fumbling for tags to describe things. In my own practical experience, I've seen graphic artists struggling to tag their graphics for DoD purposes and pulling tags out of their *sses, lacking the military vocabulary to adequately tag what is depicted. I've been that person trying to figure that crap out.

That's the professional side of my rant. I've seen this stuff in action for half a decade and it largely SUX.

Now go to flickr. Try doing a search on a common tag. Okay, people are a bit better there, but still, you'll probably hit a 20% anomaly rate of things that make you scratch your head and say "Whatthef*ck?" Try any other tag based system, and then come back and defend tagging as a professional method of filing.

And this is what the future is pointing to: metadata, tagging, doing queries on our own desktop files instead of using the foresight to create the structures to adequately organize our data in the first place.

Okay, what set this off? So I wanted a category cloud for my WordPress set-up. However, I had imported the previous 2200+ entries from livejournal already, so when I installed the category cloud, the word "UNCATEGORIZED" is *HUGE* because those 2200+ entries are currently untagged. So I've tagged 2.5 years worth of posts and I'm not a happy camper, and even as I go, I see that I'll have to go back and re-tag, and quite frankly, as long as the human element is involved, it's all just a buncha crap.

Of course, knowing this on a fundamental level will not stop me from tagging the other 1700+ posts.

::bangs head against the wall futilely::

I am a Web 2.0 victim.

Comments

Web 2.0 fallout

[reynard.livejournal.com]

I recall someone using this example:

When you have 1 cow, you name it. When you have 10,000 cows, you don't name them. Why should you have to name all of your 10,000 files?

To which I respond: because 20 of those cows are my tax returns, and I don't want them wandering into a deletion ravine. And 100 of them are my family photos and I want to find them faster.

sheesh. you're right, nobody wants to think ahead anymore.....

Subtly missing the point..

[sysphrog.livejournal.com]

"because 20 of those cows are my tax returns, and I don't want them wandering into a deletion ravine".

You don't need to *name* them at that point. You need to brand them and then make sure nothing with that brand goes into the ravine. You don't care if the cow's name is Clover or Blackie - you just care that nothing with the 1040A brand on its butt wanders off the ranch.

And therein lies the rub - if you have a bunch of files that only have one really important tag, you *already* know now to do it - you stick all those cows with 1040A brands into a big pen^H^H^Hfolder labelled 'Tax Returns' and you're done. Tagging buys you squat here, unless you forget that you called your 'Tax Returns' folder 'Sticking it to The Man'.

Tagging is only interesting if you can apply *multiple* useful tags to a good subset of your files. And quite often, you can't really tell beforehand what tags are useful. If you have one digital camera, you have 'Photos'. It isn't until you buy a second or replacement camera that you likely conceive of a tag 'Photos taken with my Nikon' and 'Photos taken with my Minolta'. And now you have zillions of photos taken with your first camera - and you don't dare do a mass relabel because you've already stored a milli-zillion or so photos taken with the second camera..

% df -i /home
Filesystem                Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/rootvg-home  2621440  424574 2196866   17% /home

Four hundred thousand frikking files on my laptop. Over 275K of those are archived e-mails. Another 90K are source files from some 150 or so software packages. Ain't *no* way that useful tags are going to happen here. Even if I were to put useful tags on everything (a dubious concept at best - if I'm accumulating several hundred files a day that I can't even find the time to *delete*, where am I going to find the time to *tag* them?)

There's only two possible outcomes at this point:

• Unbranded cows grazing free-range across the file system.
• Cows multi-branded until their butts look like Tommy Lee's arms, and all the brands are Mayan pictographs.

Tagging v. Taguer

[robyn-r.livejournal.com]

When I first read this I was flashing on the teen to twenty-something
with a spray-can! And thinking, "You know.. They have special cleaners
for that sort of thing!"

Does this say something about the class of neighborhood I live in?

Robyn