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Like many out in the online world, I’ve been thinking a lot about tagging lately. I’m totally on board with the whole folksonomy/user-defined taxonomy/emergent order/Wisdom of Crowds thing, and totally convinced that statistically aggregating the individual choices of a large pool of individual actors is an unbelievably valuable way to structure and move through massive heaps of data.

Here’s the thing, though: I noticed that tags were introduced on DailyKos earlier this week, and something struck me as kinda hinky. In short, Kos was encouraging the community to not only tag their own articles, but to tag each others’ posts with whatever keywords seem relevant.

The tricky thing here is the intent behind the tagging: on DailyKos, people are choosing tags not for themselves, but for their fellow community members. They’re essentially embarking on a hugely utopian vision of collective classification, which is all well and good but for one thing – it entirely misses the boat on why tagging in the Flickr/del.icio.us sense actually works.

Earlier this year at SXSW, I picked up a phrase that I’ve been horribly overusing: “leveraging solipsism.” The whole point of the phrase is to indicate that there are things that we do for ourselves, and the choices that we make when doing things solely to benefit ourselves might in fact be useful when aggregated with all the choices made by other users. This is how Amazon recommendations work (we buy books for ourselves, and a statistical analysis of other purchases by people who bought the same books as us results in a list of books that we in all likelihood will also like). This is how Google works (everybody links to sites they like, so the most-linked-to sites much be the most useful). This is how del.icio.us works (I use tags to organize my own bookmarks, and when I click on a tag I can all the bookmarks that everyone thinks relate to the same topic). All is good.

The take-home point of The Wisdom of Crowds is that this structure underlies some of our core social institutions. The stock market, for example, is essentially a mechanism for aggregating the individual self-serving choices of millions of investors, usually settling on a pretty good approximation of a company’s true worth. However, Surowiecki notes, the wisdom of crowds starts to change when the crowd is self-conscious about its actions.

Think about it this way – if you’re tagging web bookmarks for your own organization, you’re going to use certain keywords. Now, think about how you might tag those bookmarks (or whether you’ll necessarily tag some of them at all) if you know that they’ll be made public, and your goal is less to make your own life easier and more to help others find sites. The two cases are by no means the same – the change in intention actually changes the words you might choose. With others in mind, your choices might be less idiosyncratic and personal, and your own initiative to find the best tags might lessen over time (because personal gain is a heck of an incentive, and helping others). Even worse, you might find yourself gaming the system – if you really like a particular page (or, if it’s your own), you might tag it with tangentially or entirely unrelated keywords to drive traffic (it costs virtually nothing to do so, and might have very tangible benefits). This is the battle that Google fights every day, because some users are aware of the aggregation system in place and have created server farms to exploit it.

What am I getting at here? I’m not sure yet, except to say the DailyKos thing is indicative of a broader trend. People (particularly early adopters) are starting to get the idea that tagging is Important, and in their zeal to implement it in some cases they’re missing out on a subtle point that is crucial to the success of tagging at all: it works best (and might truly only work at all) when you’re not thinking about the end uses of the tags at all. Kind of like Douglas Adams’ riff on flying: for it to work right, you’ve got to forget that you’re falling and essentially miss the ground.

Comments One Comment so far. Leave a comment below.

Terry Steichen,

December 1, 2005 at 11:04 am

Hi,

I just came across this post. I’m pleased to see that at least one other person (you) noticed this and is concerned about it. As you quite correctly observe, there’s some interesting collective value in tags that reflect the taggers’ specific interests. But, when you start tagging for other reasons, this collective value becomes very distorted. Interestingly, however, that when taggers start to pay more attention to what might make sense to others, the value of the tags may increase the value of the tagged content (while diminishing the value of the tags collection itself).

Regards,

Terry Steichen

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