Why I Won’t ‘Tag’ Any of My Content
I’ve generally thought that ‘tagging’ my content was a ridiculous idea, so I suppose it’s time I explain why.
Technorati describes tags as “the real-time web, organized by you”. Why is it my responsibility to improve your search engine? People should add to the web whatever comes natural to them and not have to worry about attaching an array of ‘tags’ to it to make it relevant to any given search engine or directory. Technorati should write a search engine smart enough to retrieve and analyze and make sense of this content. If they can’t figure out how to make sense of this content in a reasonable way, then they should take the extra step of hiring more workers to sort it out with ‘tags’ themselves.
The last thing they should do is look to me to do their work.
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Comments (3)
There’s a detail you’re omitting, here. Tags can keep things easily organized for yourself and your visitors, completely removing the need for a search engine to “navigate” your content.
Tags are more global than keywords found in content. For instance, I may have an entry about web design but focusing on a certain aspect of it (such as adjusting color depths on LCD screens for consistent behaviour in Photoshop, who knows) and end up not using the word “design” in my entire post. I can still file it under Design and people can browse the “tag directory” to see all design-related posts that way. Beyond that, there is also the fact that you may not wish to resort to a search index for such things in the first place.
As for technorati — they’re just one specific group. Yes, you can end up “doing their work for them” but you don’t have to. Tags can be used in non-Technorati ways as well, and still be very convenient.
The primary advantage of tags over traditional search is that tags are human-assigned rather than machine-generated, and are therefore more accurate. As the previous commenter mentioned, something may be related to an important concept without ever mentioning a word people will search for.
Of course, this doesn’t mean you have to tag stuff for people to use tags to navigate your content. Users might bookmark your posts to Delicious (or Furl, or any of a dozen tagged social bookmark systems) with their own tags. It just helps if you tag stuff, too, so even stuff people don’t find interesting enough to bookmark will get categorized.
I believe that ultimately language analysis will make ideas like tagging quant at best. I still consider it a fairly goofy measure by which to evaluate content. Social bookmarking on the other hand I like quite a bit.