The Lair

One of the best things about user driven tagging is its ability to give a unique perspective on a subject. It’s such a powerful concept - given the right implementation and adequate safeguards - that I’m surprised more community based sites haven’t fallen over themselves to adopt it. One of the biggest constraints with the otherwise excellent Blogger, for example, is the inability to categorize (and ultimately, tag) your own posts into distinct orderly little boxes.

A peripheral part of the research I went into a while ago dealt with text summarization - the ability for a computer to automatically generate a paragraph which accurately summed up the contents of a paper. Consider it an automated Cliff Notes generator, if you will. Such a tool could be used in a variety of different areas - everything from generating synopses for papers and books to associating content with keywords and phrases. But the problem is that automated keyword or summary generators with a sufficiently high degree of accuracy are still hard to come by - and aren’t often seen in real world implementations.

Obviously, if computers can’t do it; then humans must. And that’s how tagging evolved. For everything from Flickr (a couple of judiciously used tags is worth as much as a good picture) to del.icio.us (tag your bookmarks for great justice!). Fortunately, tags aren’t just used for one word summaries of the article at hand; but can also be used to give lots of funny (and entertaining) viewpoints into an otherwise innocuous story. Take, for example, Slashdot’s recent story on Sun Microsystems and open sourcing Java. (Yes, yet another story. Just let it die already, kthx).

And the tags? Funny, but also appropriate. “yes, no, maybe”. Roughly translated as: we don’t know, we don’t care and the article doesn’t really change our opinions one way or another. Even before reading the summary, a perusal of the tags associated with the story told me everything I needed to know - no new light shed on this hoary and much flogged to death open source hobby horse; just let this story go already.

So, tags can actually be an annotation made by readers before you: a warning, a succinct summary and also their perspective. It can be hilarious or offensive. Sometimes both. Witness a recent tagging incident where some errant iconoclast with tagging powers dubbed a religious posting as “zombie fiction”. Some folks were amused. Others were considerably less than amused. Effective tag? Undoubtedly.

The point of this boring ramble? I’m thrilled at how well the tagging feature on my own private feedreader project has progressed - and how it’s been used. Some of the best things about allowing the wider audience to tag have been revealed. Of course, I’m not forgetting the occasional bouts of mayhem either… But provided I can avoid the broken window syndrome, I’m contemplating opening tagging out to a larger audience again… cautiously, and with the possibility of withdrawing it on abuse - but it seems like a worthwhile experiment.

And now, the obligatory (although completely harmless) screenshot.