edugadget - tagwebs…natural relationships (from: PubSub: Scoble)
http://www.edugadget.com/2005/03/02/tagweb-natural-relationships/
Weblog: edugadgetSource: tagwebs…natural relationships
Link: http://www.edugadget.com/2005/03/02/tagweb-natural-relationships/
What: Excellent essay by Jason Lodwick on tagwebs. What is a tagweb? Jason says…
What if we could tag not just photos, but also other tags? We could start to build a tagweb. When a tagweb is created from your tags, that tagweb works perfectly within the realm of what makes sense to you. The reason nobody came up with this before Flickr was because we didn’t have Flickr as a visible reference point. You can’t just imagine something out of the blue without first thinking about related things.
- A tagweb is a network of ideas that can be graphed on a computer or on paper.
- A tagweb is not built deliberately; it emerges naturally as users contribute to a system.
- A tagweb requires no external information.
- A tagweb emulates its creator’s brain.
- As a tagweb grows, it becomes more useful.
- A tagweb does not “understand” its contents; rather, it understands the relationships of its contents.
In his essay, Jason walks through tags and how they link related items. He provides nice examples and two short movies to describe his thoughts on how tags allow you “…to organize things in a way that makes sense to your brain.”
I first wrote about the use of tags as a way to unlock the value of lesson and unit plans that go to waste in binders at school here. There was a response from Thomas Hoffman at eSchool Online here and my response followed. It was a nice to and fro that made me more interested in the use of tagging. I have read more about the subject from Stephen Downes who has his doubts about tagging. I have also stayed tuned to the constant discussion about tagging at Many2Many where I found the link to Jason’s essay.
Summary
I wish tagging was available in all kinds of applications, like word processing, presentation, spreadsheet, imaging, and don’t forget operating systems (Robert Scoble - Could you please let somebody at Microsoft know? Thanks). Imagine if you could search your school’s network drive for tagged items natively. I know there are third party sites like Flickr, del.icio.us, MetaFilter, and Technorati (sure I probably missed someone) but wouldn’t it be nice if you could tag your own work as it was created and then others could tag it with those sites when they view it?
Maybe there could be some sort of agreed data model that would recognize a standard field for tags in all applications and web-based artifacts (XML?). I’m no techie but it seems doable.
The use of tags to create relationships just makes sense. When a large group of people tags, there will naturally be a “normalizing” of the tags and patterns begin to emerge. It seems that it is difficult for people to have faith in the notion that many different people tagging many different items can result in anything meaningful and that may be the real issue.
Maybe the whole tagging/controlled vocabulary debate is an apple and orange comparison. Maybe they are complementary processes. Classify one way and decribe relationships another. At the end of the day, understanding the relationship and context of what we find is an important part of using technology in a meaninful way.