Summary: I need to study and think/write more about tags. There is an alternative to my personal project management style: piles, each more or less in sequence of treatment-- most recent on top. The alternative is sorting entries by category; it gives easy, efficient access to information, via an established conceptual map. The map can be personal. or professional or cultural. In the case of information storage, the category map would give access to to entries which relate to certain areas of knowledge and the experience to which it relates.
As I understand it, tagging is categorizing on the fly by individual tag users (see the definitions at Technorati and at del.icio.us (under bookmarklets.. about half-way down the page) . As soon as more than one person is involved in tag use the degree of agreement on tag meaning becomes a possible problem. The joint understanding must be there if miss-sorting and consequent loss of information is to be avoided. This issue becomes critical in proportion to the number of users of the tag system.
If the group is small--a club, a family, a neighborhood--- the tags can circulate informally or while expertise is being passed on; if you're learning to harvest wheat, conduct a burial, prepare a meal, about to marry or adopt a child. When you are in common (generally experienced by at least one person in a neighborhood or family) situations with more or less common goals, the vocabulary can be shared and easily passed from the experienced to the inexperienced, the expert to the inexpert, in the course of actually doing or in processing that common situation. In short, transmission is clean/efficient when tag and the situational experience it refers to are pretty clear. There are, however, many situations in which much works against clarity.
What if, for example,a group is made up of members who , each unknown to the others, is working on material that is related. Relatedness is important because of the possibility of cross-fertilization between similar lines of thought?
The discovery of overlap will lead to investigation, reading and, ultimately, to an improved development in one's own knowledge-making efforts. It is this scenario that is at the core of my belief that knowledge-making efforts, as a whole and for individuals, will be markedly improved by comprehensive access to related lines and types of thought. Improved access of this sort will lead to faster development of useful knowledge -for individuals and the sum of individual working with the knowledge venue. Knowledge development that is both faster and "deeper" constitutes the payoff for the effort that goes into developing and using a universal category system for submissions, including weblog posts*, into web, or any other, common knowledge "space" .
I don't think that tags, as they are presently constructed and used, aren't the final answer. Why? First, their relationship to deep bodies of knowledge has not been established. This limits search possibilities for the universal audience which includes people with varying depth of skill re the published material. One way or another the ontological tree --ie the body of ideas upon which this one is built and which are built upon this one should be linked to this one -- needs to be easily accessible via the item coding. Second, and equally important, the terms that are used should not only relate to the ontological tree, but should be common and/or commensursate, i.e., translatable one into the other. Inaccessible terms, for example, the terms used only by a group of three avant-garde artificial intelligence researchers, clearly do not suit the needs of the maximal development of universal understanding.
Is the use of tags a movement in the right direction?
Yes!
By way of illustration:
If attaching tags at the moment of weblog entry completion helps me get better access to my own body of work, then tags have already helped.
If, not only I but all other members of a group of webloggers who are writing about weblogs in education, write my entries using group terms (and tag my entries using those terms ) then I've probably increased my own and my fellow group members access to my reasoning. I've also gained access to the entries of others who are working on related material. This done, we all, as individuals and as a whole, will learn more and faster in our tagged area of knowledge.
Interestingly, here are Technorati's most popular of more than 837000 tags presently(5/5/05) in use. The word "tag" is not among the most used ];o] !!
*Looking ahead I think that the following need doing:
all intellectual material placed on-line, not just weblogs, not just current efforts. Category system has to be developed . Whatever form it takes, it should be automatic -- tags/labels generated according to some accepted system for classifying knowledge. Systems of access for various purposes should then be built. Once the ontology --the knowledge vocabulary and hierarchy is developed, navigation systems for various knowledge consuming and/or Knowledge-making could then be constructed. Maps for the various user groups would differ; the full ontology would be the "same" for all but used differently by the different consuming and developing groups.
**Not that there are not reasons for having private (as in restricted usage) vocabulary or languages. However, for so long as, and to the extent that, a language or vocabulary is private is the degree to which they undermine the goal of advancement of universal understanding. Sometimes this is seen to be OK. For example, in the cases of a) developing proprietary knowledge e.g., new software for commercial use) or b) of espionage and spying, the disadvantage to universal understanding is seen to be a benefit to the knowledge-makers.
