

Web 2.0: Do tags work? (Case study: Flickr) - bkudria
http://www.tekka.net/10/tags.html#

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neilk
It's a strawman argument -- tags do not replace library science, film at 11 --
but she does say some interesting things along the way. If you replace "tags
ought to do" with "archival systems ought to do" it's an interesting
meditation.

Although, her notion of encoding potential narratives into images seems like
the old AI dream. Like you could somehow query "triumph against adversity" and
get a picture of a schooner crashing through a wave. I think after the last 50
years we have to be more humble about what machines can achieve.

P.S: this is the fault of the hosting magazine, Tekka, but they are certainly
failing even at elementary archiving and contextualization duties here. The
date of publication is not noted, nor is there any link to describe who Cathy
Marshall is. There's an issue/volume header at the top, without any other
context. They're thinking print, not web. The tagline of "serious hypertext"
is silly.

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pclark
I agree with what joshu (delicious founder, but thats not the point) said last
time this was posted:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=448669>

> Flickr tags are by people categorizing their own photos (that is, publisher-
> generated categorization.) Not people categorizing things they've found or
> aren't theirs. This leads to radically different behavior. Given this is a
> librarian, the second case is much more relevant and interesting.

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unalone
Well-written, but it ignores that the main use of tags are for individual
users. I tag my photos in Flickr so that they're sortable within _my_ photos.
So Flickr.com/unalone/tag/mike (that's not the actual URL) gets me every photo
that I've taken with Mike in it. No, it doesn't help the omnipotent Mike
searcher - perhaps I'm mucking data up - but it means that as I continue to
photograph Mike, I get a quick pool of photos that revolve around that theme.

Not everything is about creating an indexable, searchable database. If
anything, I'd think that some level of user moderation for searches would be
more logical than tag sorting. No - tags are best used as a more flexible
version of taxonomy, for localized sorting and filing.

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joubert
Pretty well-written article. Interesting analysis.

