On a more directed note
So there's this Shirky article that my friend Dave sent me (see post below). He's all excited about distributed computing and social tagging, and it's just possible he may change the world with it. We've been discussing at length about the pros and cons and whether or not it's better to let the users generate the categories or not.
But Shirky brings up something that is exactly my problem with social tagging:
"There's an analogy here with every journalist who has ever looked at the Web and said "Well, it needs an editor." The Web has an editor, it's everybody. In a world where publishing is expensive, the act of publishing is also a statement of quality -- the filter comes before the publication. In a world where publishing is cheap, putting something out there says nothing about its quality. It's what happens after it gets published that matters. If people don't point to it, other people won't read it. But the idea that the filtering is after the publishing is incredibly foreign to journalists.
Similarly, the idea that the categorization is done after things are tagged is incredibly foreign to cataloguers. Much of the expense of existing catalogue systems is in trying to prevent one-off categories. With tagging, what you say is "As long as a lot of people are tagging any given link, the rare tags can be used or ignored, as the user likes. We won't even have to expend the cost to prevent people from using them. We'll just help other users ignore them if they want to.""
The tags don't give you any estimations of a) quality or b) pertinence - most tags are horrendously unspecific. Sure, they map a lot better than top-level categorizations - particularly with lots of users - but better than fourth-order lower categories? Most of the problem is that people tend to think in terms of what are called "basic level" categories - car, rather than light truck or late-model Ford; cat, rather than American shorthair or overly-fed middle-aged well-loved pet.
The beauty of an external ontological classification scheme is that the user doesn't have to do the work. Look at TV and the way Google is used, and it should be immediately obvious that users not only don't want to do it, they absolutely won't.
But Shirky brings up something that is exactly my problem with social tagging:
"There's an analogy here with every journalist who has ever looked at the Web and said "Well, it needs an editor." The Web has an editor, it's everybody. In a world where publishing is expensive, the act of publishing is also a statement of quality -- the filter comes before the publication. In a world where publishing is cheap, putting something out there says nothing about its quality. It's what happens after it gets published that matters. If people don't point to it, other people won't read it. But the idea that the filtering is after the publishing is incredibly foreign to journalists.
Similarly, the idea that the categorization is done after things are tagged is incredibly foreign to cataloguers. Much of the expense of existing catalogue systems is in trying to prevent one-off categories. With tagging, what you say is "As long as a lot of people are tagging any given link, the rare tags can be used or ignored, as the user likes. We won't even have to expend the cost to prevent people from using them. We'll just help other users ignore them if they want to.""
The tags don't give you any estimations of a) quality or b) pertinence - most tags are horrendously unspecific. Sure, they map a lot better than top-level categorizations - particularly with lots of users - but better than fourth-order lower categories? Most of the problem is that people tend to think in terms of what are called "basic level" categories - car, rather than light truck or late-model Ford; cat, rather than American shorthair or overly-fed middle-aged well-loved pet.
The beauty of an external ontological classification scheme is that the user doesn't have to do the work. Look at TV and the way Google is used, and it should be immediately obvious that users not only don't want to do it, they absolutely won't.
posted by Kira at 9:54 AM
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