Tagging
http://del.icio.us/ is touted as the premiere example of 'folksonomy' – users building a taxonomy. In other words, users creating categories, a classification system for content. In the case of this site, a folder, but you get to put the same bookmark in three or a dozen 'folders' if you'd like. This is tagging at work.
I arrive at this site by way of Wikipedia where I've looked up 'folksonomy'. It is, apparently, a venue for storing, sharing and, ostensibly, discovering new bookmarks. Here's where the tagging comes in. You put in a bookmark, and you tag it. Others can find it.
What about the potential of tagging for adding dimension to a doc set? Well, I could see a company leveraging this in their specific space, allowing users to share bookmarks to industry related information. This is particularly interesting in our space, open source.
In the case of Viddler, which I mentioned in my screencasting blog, the tags added to moments in a video become part of searchable content. Users could search the help system for, for instance, 'jboss gotchas' and pull in hits across the content. The indexing possibilities are greater because there are a greater number of users weighing in on what to call something. There's a way in which all of this is just about making content more accessible by search tools. This dovetails nicely with my other reading, Content Management for Dynamic Web Delivery and Managing Enterprise Content.
From the another perspective, I can see how a user could zero in on people in the community who are 'like' themselves. In our case, other open source managers, other developers using open source, other enterprises using open source etc. In a social context, this worries me a bit. Though I don't know why it should given that that's how I make my decisions about who I'm going to spend my time with anyway. And I suppose this is what we're doing when we read the New York Times versus The Wall Street Journal. An interesting discussion of how this all could backfire in the greater scheme of things can be found in Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur.
I also wonder about the usefulness of sorting through all that unindexed messiness. Even I don't agree with me about what to call things sometimes, and I end up with the same content spread across two folders, literal or digital. I know this is one of the difficulties in the discipline of information retrieval: how often two users agree on what to call a thing.
I came across your post while doing a bit of research for a project I’m working on called TekTag (www.tektag.com). Funny enough, we’re a tagging site looking into open source consultancies; and the first one I go to is writing about tagging.
Anyway, we’d love to get some input from you guys. We are attempting to build up a knowledge base on open source and other technologies using social bookmarking. The idea is to allow the community to contribute to a specialized space that deals in answers to technical questions. We will really be a kind of meta directory to all the great content out there.
To your point on differences in tagging, this is certainly true. Even in official taxonomies of software. So I think the only answer is to tolerate differences and provide multiple means of searching and navigating to give people the best shot. We’ve also been toying with the idea of a tag equivalence dictionary that you can turn on to help with searches.
Anyway, if you’re up for it, we’d love some feedback.
Tim