Jon Udell’s latest post on tagging as declarative programming reminded me of some notes I made last year for a (never written) paper on tagging:

I’m interested in looking at tagging practice outside of the information retrieval framework in which they’ve mostly been discussed. There are at least two other possible frameworks I can think of: service integration and content authoring.

Flexible service integration

Looked at from a service integration point of view, tags provide a flexible way to route information between different applications, whether these are two different kinds of applications used by the same person or two similar applications used by different people. So I may tag my blog entries a certain way so that they will show up in a certain place in someone else’s newsreader–and I can do this despite a lack of standards (beyond RSS and grokking keyword tags) among the toolmakers. Most of the tools built on the Flickr API, as well as many “mash-up” apps in general, rely on the lightweight semantic interoperability provided by tags.

In the past semantic interoperability has been hard to achieve unless one company controlled all the different applications–something that Microsoft came close to achieving, but lost control of with the rise of the WWW. The WWW made great strides in giving applications a common communication protocol (HTTP) and interface description language (HTML), but has struggled with finding common content description languages. First XML, then RDF were the intended answers to this, but they may be too rigid for their intended purpose. Tags may provide enough of the value of more structured schemes to be useful, without the overhead of a complex standardization process.

From the service integration perspective, sharing, notification, and system improvement are the primary goals (and possibly play/competition as well if we consider games as a specific kind of application or mode in which applications can be used). Action, insider reference, and possibly spam are the relevant tag types.

Lightweight content authoring

A more interesting (to me at least) alternative framework is tagging as a form of lightweight authoring. I’ve been struck by how taxonomies of tag types resemble taxonomies of link types from the early hypertext literature. Tags for URL-specified resources in systems such as del.icio.us are basically aggregate hyperlinks (links that associate a set of like documents) as described in the literature. If creating hypertext or hypermedia links is a form of authorship, it seems to be tagging (or certain kinds of tagging) should be as well.

Certainly the first steps in many kinds of authoring, from the creation of an annotated bibliography in preparation for a scholarly article to the separation of clips into bins for a video production, resemble the tagging and sorting enabled by tagging systems. The first blogs were linklogs, and now many people like me use linklogs as a form of lazy blogging. The unmediated blog uses del.icio.us to enable simple collaborative authoring, tagging can be used on Flickr to create slideshows, and del.icio.us via its media support turns tagging into a way to sequence audio and video.

From the content authoring perspective, attracting attention, reputation, identity performance, and opinion influencing are the primary goals, while opinion, relation, and possibly spam are the relevant tag types.

Back to information retrieval

So I would argue that the focus on information retrieval has pushed people to think of tags as primarily descriptive or categorical and tagging practice as primarily retrieval-oriented. This is certainly an important area, and you cover the issues quite well in your paper, I think. But even if tags turn out to be useless for search, they still could be of great value from other perspectives.

[Tangent: I really like Patrick Wilson’s notion of two kinds of power information retrieval systems can offer. The first is descriptive power: the power to obtain all texts which meet some description. The second is exploitative power: the power to obtain the best texts for achieving some end. Google gives us a lot of the former and very little of the latter. Could the analysis of tags used for service integration or authoring give systems a sense of how specific texts are being exploited by different individuals or communities, and thus offer users greater exploitative power?]

The problem with these ideas, I think, is that studies of why people tag show that this isn’t at all how people typically think of tagging (that is, the small minority who even think of tagging at all). Even in cases where people use tags for social communication, I don’t believe they see what they’re doing in terms of integration or authoring. That might change, of course, but I’m not willing to bet on it just yet.

The latest issue of Harper’s features an excellent roundtable discussion on how video games might be used to teach writing. Though most of it will be familiar to anyone who has followed recent debates about “serious games,” it is worth reading. Among the discussants, Raph Koster stood out as particularly insighful, and his comments about new forms of literacy really struck home:

What we mean by literacy is changing. If you look at books like The Da Vinci Code, a lot of what it does is appropriation–of a painting, or a historical text–and annotation, with this whole cottage industry of providing the footnotes: the TV specials, the books. … Appropriation and annotation are becoming our new forms of literacy.

Appropriation and annotation (or, to use the popular vernacular, remix and tagging) have been at the center of my interests for a while now, but it’s nice to see them being discussed in a high-profile forum like Harper’s.

Koster’s comments echo the views of my friend Dan Perkel, who has been investigating “copy and paste literacy” on MySpace. Many people focus on the “remix culture” of appropriation and annotation as if it is something new–but these practices have been around since the dawn of culture. What is new, as Koster and Dan indicate, is the general rise in people’s ability to recognize and engage in these practices: their literacy.

The discussion in Harper’s ends with a kind of lament that a population highly literate in appropriation and annotation will squeeze out the “great artist” by flooding our culture with lesser-quality niche productions. I agree with that conclusion but not the explanation. The era of the great artist will come to an end, not because of overcrowded cultural markets, but because a literate population will recognize appropriation and annotation at the heart of all creative production, and it will reject the myths of the solitary genius and the original creative act that have dominated for the last few centuries. The great artist will disappear, but there will continue to be great art.

Update (April 23, 2006): This weekend La La pushed a new catalog which considerably improves the metadata situation. There is room for improvement (still no Spoombung or Sarin Israel Nes Ziona), but I’m far happier than before.

I’ve been using La La a lot lately. La La is a great, simple idea: create a CD bartering marketplace, exploiting the web as an extremely efficient machine for matching those who want with those who have, and borrowing a streamlined postal delivery mechanism from NetFlix. All you really need is a database full of CD catalog metadata, a neato AJAXified interface, and a bunch of preprinted CD mailing cases, and you can sit back and let the $1.50 per trade pour in.

But that CD catalog metadata had better be good. Every CD missing from it is a trade that will never happen. Every CD filed under the wrong artist is a trade that will never happen. Every box set listed as a single CD, every truncated album title… you get the idea. Even incorrect cover art could lead to confusion and inhibit trading. Bad metadata is especially destructive for the long tail trades–if only one person out there in La La land has the CD I want, and they have trouble finding a way to list their CD because it’s listed in La La’s catalog with the wrong info… well, it’s goodbye La La and back to Amoeba for me.

Unfortunately for La La, their metadata sucks. They have all the problems listed above and more. Missing CDs I could possibly forgive–maybe they’re due to legal doubts around imports–but mispellings, uncorrelated artist name variations, and truncated album titles I can’t. My advice to anyone thinking of starting a similar venture: don’t try to build your own metadata catalog, and don’t buy one from some crappy closed metadata vendor. Closed vendors can’t scale to the long tail. You need metadata from an open system: in the case of music, something like MusicBrainz or Discogs (I think Discogs is slightly better). The closed metadata company’s drones won’t get around to cataloging the latest Spoombung album or a limited edition Muslimgauze CD. Hardcore music fans, on the other hand, will–especially if it means they’ll be able to trade them.

Services like La La exist by virtue of their metadata. If they aren’t careful, they’ll cease to exist because of their metadata too.

According to CollaborativeRank, I am one of the top 500 most helpful del.icio.us users (#376, to be exact). Furthermore, my “areas of expertise” are semweb, testing, usability, metadata, and rdf, which seems pretty bogus, as I would consider myself expert in only one of those areas. Still, pretty cool. Can I get a T-shirt or something?

Update (8/15/2005): Now I’m #5366. CollabRank fame is fleeting…

In an attempt to revive the moribund categorization scheme for this blog, tonight I used Delicious Python to suck my tags down from del.icio.us and make them WordPress categories, so I can use them to tag posts. The tags for each post are linked to Technorati and del.icio.us, and they look like this:

Now to see if this is actually useful, or just trendy geek chic.

My favorite part of “Writing a Social Content Engine with RDF:”

At the time I was puzzled by finding ways to categorize knowledge–wanting to build all kinds of complicated virtual file systems and the like…. But Del.icio.us tags pretty much demonstrated that this was actually trivial–and that thinking about this too much is basically just a waste of time.

<em>phasis mine. Words to live by…