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How can tagging be more useful?

March 11, 2006 11:39 AM PST

AUSTIN, TEXAS--These days, two of the hottest words in interactive Web circles are "folksonomy" and "tagging."

In general, the words are somewhat interchangeable and refer to the user-created keywords that bring context and meaning to online content. Examples are the tags that make the millions of photographs hosted by Flickr or the millions of bookmarked Web pages on Del.icio.us searchable and more usable.

But in a panel entitled "Beyond Folksonomies: Knitting tag clouds for grandma" at the South by Southwest conference here, a panel discussion with more than 200 in attendance was the place for some of the most clued-in taggers and fans of folksonomies in the world to vent about how they find the technology sorely lacking for true usefulness.

In general, the conversation went, tagging is a wonderful tool, but often doesn't meet users' needs because as it stands today, it leaves out too much context: What does the tag "afghan" mean? Is it a dog, a blanket, someone from Afghanistan?

That means, the panelists and audience members argued, that while tagging offers the promise of fully contextual content, it can still be too hard for users to find what they want, or to re-find something they've bookmarked or manually tagged.

The point of the discussion was to begin the process of arriving at a solution. But as the panelists acknowledged, we're not far enough along for the technology to exist that can truly bring meaning and context to content. And yet, each day, new attempts--social bookmarking services, automatic tagging services and such things?-come along in the hope that they will be the magic answer.

Still, while no one yet knows what will provide the solution for mass numbers of users, and not just the power users in attendance Saturday, it is heartening to know that people in positions of influence in social media are the ones pushing for this kind of change. And thus, it is easy to imagine that a year or two from now, everyone will know what tagging is because it will just work.

Posted by Daniel Terdiman

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