Uneasy Rhetoric

Marnie Webb wonders about the value of tagging. She comes to the conclusion that the value of tagging does not lie in search, but in “discovery” and “aggregation.”

I would tend to agree, although both discovery and aggregation imply a kind of search, they certainly are not the “search” we’ve come to know through Google or Yahoo or anywhere else. That kind of search implies we have something specific in mind and are trying our best to hone in on exactly what we are looking for.

I like to think of tagging in the same way that one might think of using a library. We can go to a library, go to the catalog, find the call number of the book we want, and get it. This would be “search.”

On the other hand, what if we know what subject we want to look for, but don’t have a specific book in mind? We might go to the librarian and ask “where are your books on Shakespeare?” or we might go to the catalog and look for a book on Shakespeare because we know there will be others around that book. In both cases our goal is not a specific item but a location where we can browse a number of items. We scan the shelves, looking to see if maybe several might be what we are looking for. This is “discovery.”

This is also aggregation. Libraries are not archives. They do not have everything. Somewhere someone made a judgment that the library should have these particular books on Shakespeare, and not others. All of the books deemed worthy are brought together in one place.

Unlike libraries, though, tagging sites like del.icio.us or Flickr are noisy. Where in a library a relatively small number of people make aggregation decisions and where the cataloging system has fairly rigid guidelines for what goes where, tagging is organic. One man’s “puppy” is another man’s “dog.” Still, in true social networking fashion, these tags can lead to great discoveries if one has the patience to follow the paths.