Dave Johnson

I just stumbled upon a short post by John Battelle where he asks whether tags are going to work in the long run [1].

From my point of view the only good application of tags is for data that has no computer readable meta-data - ie they are a stop-gap. Photos, movies, songs even smells (one day) are the types of information that are hard to find using a search engine. Though sooner than later we should be able to search for “sunset” and Flickr will return a picture like this. However, when it comes to web pages there is plenty of information for search engines to work with. Why use a limited set of usually homogeneous tags to define a web page on del.icio.us when you can likely find it just as fast, or faster, using a search engine instead?

Furthermore, I’m lazy, I don’t like to think up new tags for resources that I find and for the most part I end up tagging almost everything that I find with my homogeneous tag set of XML, JavaScript, blog and AJAX … go figure. So in the end tagging is only slightly better than using my favourites in my web browser.

Having said that, there is one place that tagging might actually be useful, but only to a slightly larger degree, and that is with news. Having the del.icio.us RSS feed for AJAX is great since it is essentially a human aggregated feed for AJAX news. Still, in the future I anticipate that I will likely just ask Technorati or equivalent instead.

All and all I have quickly fallen out of love with tags and the limited use they have [2].

As for the companies that are building businesses based on tagging - it seems to be a pretty good idea.

Update: found a great post about tags here.

[1] Will Tagging Work - John Battelle, Dec 4, 2005
[2] Tagging Tags - Dave Johnson, Dec 1, 2005

Del.icio.us

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 14th, 2005 at 12:54 pm and is filed under Web2.0, AJAX, Business, Tagging, Semantic Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.