In some way, tags aren't new. Kids scribble on side margins of their notebook instead of paying attention in class, and then they scribble bigger words (graffidi) on walls and sidewalks late at night.
Just that we found a way to make it useful for the web.
It's all about balance between freedom of expression vs. potential abuse. In flickr, average users either never bother to leave tags, or they leave them they way tags should work: keywords that relate to your picture/post. There are people who think it's cute and tag Web20 to a naked celebrity photo, and those are noise. Noise exists in all systems of communication, or in fact, they exist in all system, period. Human beings are incredibly good at filtering out low volume of noise.
Tags provide a clear path towards organized chaos, which leads to unplanned creativity. The benefits of these tiny random innovations may not be apparent in the business world. However, with collective intelligence of a network of people wanting to contribute, tags beats traditional database for organizing data, especially data that are "out of the ordinary and cannot be easily referenced", which often is the needle we subconciously look for in the haystack.
No comments:
Post a Comment