Gravity7: Social Interaction Design by Adrian Chan: Tag collections, aggregation, and mainstreaming

Gravity7: Social Interaction Design by Adrian Chan

A social media design and strategy blog focused on social web user practices, user experience, social interaction design, social media strategy, and implementation. A consultant and former developer and designer's view on Web 2.0 industry trends, social networks, conversational media, news, companies, and campaigns. Focus is on best and emerging practices in social media, using psychology, sociology, media and communication theories for insights.

Friday, January 20, 2006

Tag collections, aggregation, and mainstreaming

Just a quick thought on tagging. With all the social software and community, as well as blogging and other services embedding tagging, i wonder if the net effect may be a mainstreaming at the expense of granularity. I noticed that I often tag up sites on delicious with the most obvvious, common, and recommended tags. And i bother less now than i used to to create new ones, or to use specific ones. In part because I dont want something to get looked over, so my laziness results in a lazy contribution. Just a thought. It would be a pity if tagging cultures left behind a bunch of interesting but overlooked isolates; isolates being sites that are interesting but just never got the traction.

Comments: :

Anonymous said...: your right. I get lazy too with delicious. It takes a bit to get me really thinking about my tags when I bookmark.

Any sort of popularity based recommendation system becomes a self fulfilling prophecy; always recommending what become popular.

Recommending tags becomes a way of keeping the tag set small. It looks like it would probably reduce the weight in the long tail of different tags, clumping tags in the popular fat head of our old friend the power law curve.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Heterogeneity of tags is certainly not useful. However with the suggestion system that delicious uses it brings up a lot of related terms, synonyms or alternate spellings.

One form of recommendation is to suggest things that are not the most popular, throw in a slight element of randomness. The suggestion would say "I know you are going to tag this with these, but how about these other things you havent thought about?"; 6:35 AM
adrian chan said...: dan,
agreed. i'm reminded of the biodiversity argument. knowledge benefits from diveristy; tag collections benefit from diverse sites.
taxonomies, or tags (which are opposed to taxonomies but are terms with associations nonetheless) benefit from whatever logic drives their associations. i think tag cultures tend to reflect the popularity logic, or to quote deToqueville, the "tyranny of the majority." ....; 5:06 PM
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