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January 27, 2005

Burningbird on why tagging can't violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Burningbird pulls together a whole bunch of excellent posts about tags, and marshalls them into a discussion dead center on the main point:

I believe that ultimately interest in folksonomies will go the way of most memes, in that they're fun to play with, but eventually we want something that won’t splinter, crack, and stumble the very first day it’s released.

...no matter how many tricks you play with something like tags, you can only pull out as much 'meaning' as you put into them.

...the semantic web is going to be built 'by the people', but it won’t be built on chaos. In other words, 100 monkeys typing long enough will NOT write Shakespeare; nor will a 100 million people randomly forming associations create the semantic web.

(This snippet doesn't do justice to the piece. It's a must-read.)

Shelley understands this stuff better than I do, but I'm not convinced she's right. My initial concern about the hype is whether we're going to get more apps that get us tagging. If we don't, then tags won't have much effect. If we do, then I simply don't know whether we're going to be able to solve the problems inherent in scaling tags: Tags work because they're so simple and because they are so connected to the human semantic context, but having billions of tags won't work because they're so simple and connected to the human semantic context. Will we be able to triangulate tags with other data - especially social data - so that we can get more out of them than we put in? It doesn't seem impossible to me - simply knowing who created a tag lets you get more out of the tag than the person put in - but it's not up to me to invent the stuff.

So, I think you can get more out of a tag than someone put in. But I don't know how and I don't know if we will.

Posted by D. Weinberger at January 27, 2005 03:44 PM

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» Tags, Meta Tags, Meta Data, Yada Yada from Pito's Blog
It is of course impossible to keep up with the avalanche of discussion about the topic of tags, folksonomies, tagonomies. David Weinberger points to a (beautifully designed: love those pictures!) essay on the topic from burningbird with lots of good qu... [Read More]

Tracked on January 27, 2005 04:57 PM

» What is "Tag Spam"? Or better, Tag Spam exists? from Paolo Massa Blog
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Tracked on January 29, 2005 07:38 AM

» Today's Links from Roland Tanglao's Weblog
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Tracked on February 1, 2005 09:01 AM

» I Heart Tags from AKMA’s Random Thoughts
After Dave Winer cited my Friday post about tagging, I’ve been remonstrating with myself for saying only part of what I wanted to say. Yes, there’s a problem with the present state of tags (and the fact that Roland and Dan chimed in tends t... [Read More]

Tracked on February 6, 2005 08:43 PM

» Poll Tags from AKMA’s Random Thoughts
When I read about Technorati tags, I was excited. In fact, I knew to be excited about it because Kevin messaged me, and first thing I read about them online was David Weinberger’s encomium, and when Kevin and David are excited about something, I ... [Read More]

Tracked on February 6, 2005 08:57 PM

» Tags e a gentenomia from blaz

Caramba! Comecei este post depois de ver a página de tags do CCMixter, e sacando a boa idéia de visualmente escalar as tags na relação 'tamanho x itens' (, e sacando a boa idéia de visualmente escalar as tags na relação 'tamanho x itens' ( [Read More]

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Comments

David, as I commented at Shelley's, by encouraging people to put URL-based tags in their pages, we are implicitly capturing more information - the person who does the tagging is identified by the blog, and the tagspace used is in the URL.

If people want to define ontological tagspaces that are more formally structured, or based on Wilkins' system they can certainly do this and have them fully compatible with this markup and indexing model.

It's all about making it easy for people to add meaning.

Posted by: Kevin Marks | January 27, 2005 07:35 PM

Mentioning the second law of thermodynamics is nice and, like the 'monkeys typing' analogy, hints at an different perspective on folksonomies. The 2nd law is often invoked by those who oppose evolutionary theory, but natural selection is the one process we know about that can bring complexity from chaos. And I'm starting to think that there are Darwinian processes at work in the usage and development of folksonomies.

Posted by: Ben Lund | January 28, 2005 05:28 AM

Way back when I was knee-high to a VAX, you could put META tags in your HTML page with keywords to describe it, so that anyone looking for one of those keywords in a search engine could see your page. Nowadays, search engines pretty much ignore META tags, because of how spammers abused the keyword feature.

What will prevent tags from going the way of META keywords?

Posted by: Seth Gordon | January 28, 2005 11:09 AM

First, the idea of triangulating is most appropriate: generating a dynamic vacabulary from ongoing language usage analysis within a defined (managed) group (social net).
Second, I believe there's a way to do this based on the results of my team's development funded by the Agencies, et al. The key is a closed social system with an open vacabulary. Make sense (pun intended)?
JIm

Posted by: JIm Bair | January 28, 2005 01:04 PM

I too think you can get more out of a tag than someone put in.

A bit like algebra. You create equations based on what you know. This doesn't add any new information. But once you've got the equations you deduce interesting things by relating them to one another.

Algebra makes this process simple, and potentially automatable.

Posted by: mike harper | March 1, 2005 07:30 AM

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