December 19, 2008

Tagging is selfish

The requirement for having tagged content is one that comes up pretty often in my part of the web world. People want to have community-tagged content. That means that “The Crowd” helps organize content by entering keywords that describe it.

This feature suggestion is nearly always flawed because people are selfish.

Tagging is inherently selfish.

If you look at Del.icio.us, a social bookmarking service, people tag content for their own personal motives. They use their own vocabulary to describe content in a way that fits how they interpret the world. And people, really, don’t agree that often and that precisely. People are less often curators for others, more often for themselves.

Tagging requires cooperation.

Tags are useful only when people independently agree on which keywords define content. This is Linguistics 101. People who are disconnected from each other will rarely agree on common vocabulary, idioms, semantics and syntax for structuring tags.

When they don’t agree precisely you’ll see tags in plural, tags in singular. “Resources” versus “Resource”. “WebDesign” versus “Web Design.” When they don’t agree exactly, the value of crowdsourced categorization falls to nearly zero.

Tagging requires incentive.

A site like del.icio.us gives people the incentive to tag content. Delicious doesn’t manage the content, but provides a framework for you to organize and remember where content lives on the Web. That’s pretty good and pretty useful.

Contrast this with an independent site–especially one where users are transient and not likely to return repeatedly. The motivation to tag content is incredibly low. They’re tagging a closed system and, if they are fleeting visitors, they can’t project how the effort will benefit them in the future. The reward for their effort is next to none.

Tagging is hardly enforceable.

People will tag things differently, using different syntax and vocabulary. Using auto complete–where the site suggests tags based upon character similarity–can help. But forcing a user to abide by the “chosen” language degrades user experience. They lose motivation to tag because suggestions don’t accurately describe how they want to organize the information.

None of this is to preclude user-generated tagging. It’s a feature–and features by themselves are neither good nor bad. It is in their application where they become appropriate or notsomuch. Before requiring sociable features like this, you need to consider why users would want to tag anything in the first place. And you also need to consider the volume of people with an incentive to tag content. The utility of tags is based upon the volume of participants and their ability to self-organize and agree. That’s a big request.

In a high volume tag economy like flickr.com or del.icio.us, where there are many selfish people, the result can be good. It’s like Adam Smith’s position on economics. If there are enough people contributing, there is a greater volume of people who arrive at common nomenclature. This cancels out the outlier taggers and produces something together that benefits the greater good. But these are the exceptions.