Und so weiter Taggen

Noch ein schöner Text zum Taggen (bzw. das Beste das mir seit langem zum Thema über den Weg gelaufen ist): A social analysis of tagging

I come across an article I want to remember. I tag it. That moment, I go from wandering the web alone to joining a group of others. This transition is important. In a moment, I am transported to a crowd of people with whom I have at least one thing in common. And best of all, I can enjoy their presence, but I don’t need to converse. After being on many mailing lists for many years, let me say, conversation is often overrated. Often, I like to be in the company of others, without needing to follow threads and participate. It is the same reason that I like working in a cafe – enjoying the presence of others without the burden of active interaction. Similarly, tags provide a companionable social hum that I enjoy.

…An important characteristic of tagging systems is that they lead to ad-hoc group creation, lowering the barriers to finding like-minded others, enabling social discovery and connections.

The basic social formations supported by tagging are more like crowds than true groups. I see the milling crowds and have some idea about what they are doing (reading, watching), but I don’t know these people – they are not part of my network or members of my mailing lists and online communities I subscribe to. These are ad-hoc groups brought together by a particular tag or resource.

… Like all good social structures, tagging is malleable – it takes the form best supported by the content, rather than impose a rigid structure on the content. On Flickr, can lead to ad-hoc collaboration, collection self-expression that is very different than the type of tagging frenzy we witness for popular articles on del.icio.us. As tagging spreads we are likely to see other types of emergent ad-hoc collaboration.

… tagging captures our individual conceptual associations, but does not force us to categorize. It enables loose coordination, but does not enforce the same interpretation of a concept. We could all tag items as “art” but mean very different things. That would create chaos in a shared folder scheme, but works well in a social tagging system.

usw.

Auch lesenswert: The Good, The Bad & The Taggy