[Tagdb] I agree

[Timothy Spalding]

Nitin,

I think that's dead-right. While some users may gravitate to short  
tags, tagging is very much about your user base. It's also about  
what's being tagged. I find the latter is particularly so. I don't  
tag much on Delicious, but when I do I use short tags. Short tags are  
good enough because I don't have that much to tag, and most of the  
things I'm tagging are ephemeral. Tagging something "toread" or  
"FRBR" or "competitor" is good enough for that. On LibraryThing, I'm  
much more verbose. My books are my books forever!

A final factor is: Where will convention settle? Even if users "want"  
one way of doing it, enough "training" and they'll think it entirely  
natural to use one-word tags. Ultimately, although I think tagging  
NEEDS differ from person to person and tagged-thing to tagged-thing,  
I think the way people tag will converge on one answer. At present,  
however, that hasn't been set. I *think* it will settle on multi-word  
tags...

Tim

On Apr 10, 2006, at 2:37 PM, Nitin Borwankar wrote:

>
>
>
> Timothy Spalding wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> Hi Timothy, Juan,
>
> Yes, a very lively debate indeed.   Could I add a possible nuance  
> to the 2 points above?
>
> The way I read Timothy's earlier email is as follows :-
>
> It's not just that LibraryThing's users may be naive users, but  
> that they may actually prefer wordy descriptions being of a  
> literary bent.
> So its possible that the linguistic preferences of the user,   
> rather than the "maturity" may be factors.  This begs an  
> explanation as to why more technical users use single word tags.
> My explanation is that more technical users gravitate towards /  
> prefer terse, abstract descriptions rather than wordy ones because  
> of their technical background and quickly evolve to a single-word- 
> tag usage. Whereas, I hypothesize, even more mature users of a  
> literary bent may continue to use more descriptive language best  
> expressed in multiword tags.   For them expressiveness rather than  
> linguistic efficiency is paramount and my theory is that they may  
> never change that even after significant "experience".
>
> As implementers we need to be sensitive to the different linguistic  
> styles of our user communities and do what's appropriate for them.
> Forcing everyone into a "terse mode" doesn't seem like the best  
> way .....
>
> Nitin
>
>> 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
>>
>>
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