tagging is not it

by phil on Thursday May 5, 2005 9:09 PM

I'm sorry guys, Clay Shirky and whatever else, folksonomies and tagging are not it.

Great concepts, but I'm underwhelmed.

deflate

Comments

Brandon Franklin said on May 6, 2005 4:31 AM:

Honestly, I never saw the big deal, either. Seems like mainly just a bunch of random crap 99% of the time. Basically no value-add.

Bob said on May 6, 2005 12:52 PM:

Apply it to real-world objects and it reveals its ridiculousness...just use the object (or webpage, or whatever) itself to describe...itself.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/swifty/12324382/in/pool-lifehack/

Philip Dhingra said on May 6, 2005 11:49 PM:

Ahaha, that is so brillant. I should have done that instead of this post.

Travis said on May 11, 2005 9:33 PM:

Applying tags to the actual real world objects is irrelevant. If you're opening up the fridge, you're already looking at the objects. You know what's there.

However, if you have a fridge containing several hundred or thousand items, it becomes relevant. While categories are excellent for generalization (i.e. Fruits, Vegetables, Beverages) your response time is still rather slow since so much falls into them.

Granted, a list of 500,000 keywords doesn't help much for efficiency either, but that's why weighted representation was implemented.

If you added more weight to each keyword every time you got said item from the fridge, you would start to develop a system. If those keywords on the front of your fridge were then larger based on the item's relevance to you, now you're talking efficiency.