
Do Tags Work? - Jebdm
http://www.tekka.net/10/tags.html
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joshu
This is an awful analysis.

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.

One analysis without understanding the space or how the subject differs from
the desired outcome (that is, categorization) seems very embarassingly
shallow.

(Yes, this annoyed me the first time I read it, a while ago.)

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simonw
Les Orchard (who used to work for delicious.com) has a good response to this
article. Part of his argument is that Flickr is a really bad place to start a
tag analysis, since people generally only tag their own stuff (the big win for
tags comes when lots of people provide their personal tags for a single
entity, meaning you can look at the data in aggregate).
[http://decafbad.com/blog/2009/01/18/tags-do-work-for-me-
at-l...](http://decafbad.com/blog/2009/01/18/tags-do-work-for-me-at-least)

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raamdev
The findings basically show that people generally don’t use verbs when tagging
and that the titles and descriptions they write are almost always a more
useful definition of the thing being tagged (especially when searching across
large datasets).

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iamelgringo
Summary: Tags aren't really all that useful because people who write good tags
write good descriptions.

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mojonixon
holy hell, get an editor.

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annoyed
my tag just sits at home watching tv all day...stupid, lazy tag!

