There’s a statistic making the internet rounds that I find surprising. According to a bit of research from Pew, more than a quarter of internet folk have used tags to help organize their stuff. Smart Mobs, one of several sites that’s picked up on this, reports:
This Pew Internet & American Life Project report says “just as the internet allows users to create and share their own media, it is also enabling them to organize digital material their own way, rather than relying on pre-existing formats of classifying information. A December 2006 survey has found that 28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorize online content”.
Even given the tagging going on at sites such as Flickr, 28 per cent seems high. Whenever I’ve mentioned tagging to my students, who are part of the wired (or increasingly wireless) generation, I generally get shrugs and blank looks.
David Weinberger, though, puts the figure in some kind of context that, with his usual style and grace, makes sense.
Pew does good work, but let’s say the number is off way beyond the margin of error. Say it’s off by 50%. Or 75%. Or 90%. I don’t believe it’s anywhere near that wrong, but even if it were, that’s still about 3% of US Internet users creating tags. How many taggers do we need for tags to become a vital resource for the entire Web and all its denizens?
Even if just 1% of Web users tagged resources with some regularity, they would be creating handholds for the other 99%. That 1% will add a layer of meaning (or “semantics,” if you prefer the way that sounds) that will seed enough innovation and connectedness of ideas—and thus of people—that we’ll have to go straight from Web 2.0 to Web 4.0.
(Weinberger adds a touch of humour to the post but I’m not going to step on his punchline. Click the link to go read.)
TAGS: TAGS
I’m still among the tag skeptics. Free association is great when you’re dealing with smallish numbers of items and a fairly small number of people who can agree on what a word or phrase refers to. It still strikes me that relying on a flat namespace without any conventions (and only light defences against injecting spam and noise into the space) is not a really good strategy for trying to tie together billions of resources. I suspect that ambiguity and spam will lead most tagging schemes to be just so much noise.
Tags seems to be a good way to organize *your own* collection of resources. When I’m going through a giant mass of stuff that’s previously unseen by me, I’d rather navigate by a controlled vocabulary where the ‘semantics’ and contexts are defined instead of forcing me to guess. (This is one of Drupal’s more attractive features.)