The concept of tagging reminds me, yet again, why I got into library science in the first place--because I like applying order to chaos (or maybe I'm a bit of a control freak? *shrugs*). With that being said, tagging...it kind of makes my librarian roots twitchy. Yes, I agree, that tagging DOES apply some kind of order to the chaos on massive sites like flickr or LibraryThing, but...it's still a chaotic kind of order.
I know user-generated tagging and folksonomies lower the barrier for access to information, and that's a great thing in itself, but at the same time it can also increase the level of frustration when trying to access that same information. It's one thing to have one post/picture/site tagged with three different tags by one person. It's a whole other thing to have several tags used by several people to describe similar posts/pictures/sites. Do you search for cat or cats or feline or felines? Or animals? Picky, picky. I think maybe I'm kinda old school here, even though I'll readily accede that LC classification isn't exactly the easiest or most fantastic or perfect way to do it either. Cookbooks under "Cookery", anyone?
All my posts here have been tagged since I started, but I think I need to go clean them up a bit--they all need a "23 Things" tag, and I don't think they do. As for Technorati--I don't feel the need to share my particular brand of crazy with a whole new world of bloggers just yet. For all the time I spend online and with my personal blog, I'm actually quite private and I want to know who's looking at my stuff. Hmm...I see control issues surface once again, lol.
Far before these 23 Things, I've had personal experience with tagging and folksonomies, and the perils within, haha. I used to share a blog with a friend, and wow, did we NOT see eye-to-eye on how to tag things. I recall spending a good day or more cleaning up our tags, combining "fic" "fics" "story" and "stories" into one tag, bc for the purpose of our blog, they were all the same thing. She never bothered to look at the existing tags, many that she herself had created. Therefore, our blog was a mess and finding a particular post relied more on memory than any descriptors. Now, with my own blogs, I'm very careful and particular as to how I organize my posts and my "memories" (aka favorites or links).
Which I guess means, in the end, that I have developed my very own folksonomy. Go me!
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2 comments:
Sharing a blog sounds like a recipe for disaster, but then I can be a bit of a control freak myself.
Haha, yes it did get to be, but I had gone into it with her as the "face" or "spokeswoman" for our fandom journal. When she began to turn it into a "this is what I had for breakfast" kind of blog, I eventually broke down and got my own. And now I can exert my control-freakiness all over my own journal! *Mr. Burns-like cackle*
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