[Tagdb] Single and multi-word tags / swarming and spreading

[Timothy Spalding]

Juan,

Great, a debate! That was a fun email to read. Your linguistic point  
was very welcome and well taken. (I did Classics in graduate school,  
so I relish moving in a linguistic direction.)

I feel, however, that you're talking about what ought to be, not what  
is. You write:

"At the time, it made a lot of sense that multi-word labels should be  
supported, but the more I tag, especially in del.icio.us, the less I  
care about having terms I see as bound together stored as a unit."

I submit that this shows two things. (1) Naive users expect to be  
able to use multi-word tags. (2) Experienced users (particularly  
experienced users with a background in information theory) may  
gravitate to single-word tags.

It seems to that EVEN if I concede the superiority of single-word  
tags to multi-word tags AND pass over the problems of "Tiera Del  
Fuego"—something I'm not inclined to do—that users' actual behavior  
wins the point. The central principles of web design should be "don't  
make me think" (ie., a "low cognitive load) and "do what I want it to  
do." All these go against imposing any "system" on a user.

Put another way: in my head, that article is about "early America."  
Who are you to tell me it's about "early" and "America," or force me  
to call it "earlyamerica." Butt out already and let me tag my stuff!  
I thought this website was supposed to be easy! Forget this. Let's  
see who won American Idol last night.

Tim

On Apr 10, 2006, at 11:17 AM, Juan Cristian Vera wrote:

> Hi all;
>
> My name is Juan Cristian & I've been lurking for a couple of  
> months. I thought this would be a good time to jump in:
>
> I designed a social schema for work last November. Our main goal in  
> making a schema from scratch was to be able to do some  
> collaboration that exposes a sort of atomic trust-based  
> transparency model, allowing you & chosen communities in which you  
> participate to tag your stuff on our site (internal stuff, you  
> construct within the site - I call it a "flamazon" model - the  
> marketing guys don't think that's a good word...), and see other  
> tags based on the three-way trust relationship between the owner of  
> the tagged object, the tagger, & the viewer...
>
> This behavior would look a little like "swarming", except that you  
> can set the reslution of the tag cloud you see while you navigate -  
> whether you are tryinhg to reach somethign based on your tags  
> alone, those of one or more communities you belong to, or the coud  
> at large.
>
> I started reading the tagdb list when I first launched into this  
> project, not knowing much about tagging as a user. Since November,  
> however, my browsing habits, and the way I look at classification  
> in the first place, have been profoundly affected by practice in  
> tagging and some of the thought-provoking discussions on this list.  
> To wit, the first one that I ran into was a post about commas and  
> spaces in tags. At the time, it made a lot of sense that multi-word  
> labels should be supported, but the more I tag, especially in  
> del.icio.us, the less I care about having terms I see as bound  
> together stored as a unit.
>
> I respectfully disagree with Tim. I think the relatedness of two  
> words that one comes to see as one term is a form of clustering,  
> almost the beginnings of rhetorical structure. I mean, if I see a  
> picture of a dog house and label it with these two tags, dog &  
> house, I will be quite able to discern when I go looking for  
> something what are pictures of dogs in peole houses as opposed to  
> dog houses. The same problem occurs in spoken language, not just  
> with adjacent terms, but as well with homonyms. The fact that one  
> term is subordinate to another, like a sattleite paragraph in  
> rhetorical structure theory, does not make the two terms need to be  
> bound more tightly tha by coincidence in the single tagged object.  
> In fact, in omance languages they are not. "dog house" may seem  
> like a single word in english, but this composite noun, in Spanish  
> would be "la casa del perro", or without a contraction, "la casa de  
> el perro" with an article and a preposition that are implicit in  
> English, possibly implying a closer relation between "dog" &  
> "house" than there actually is.
>
> Best,
>
>
> Juan Cristián