What are your reasons for tagging?
Mine are:
- Self-referential humour (ie. linkingtomyself)
- Finding those posts, photos, files, etc. later on
- Getting my own stuff found (i.e. lesblogs)
- Connecting with a wider community (ie. firstgoatse or brrreeeport)
- Creating a proper context for who I am and what I'm about online
- Covering all roots of the tag (ie. tags, tagging, tag, folksonomies, folksonomy, etc.)
technorati tags: tagging, folksonomies, folksonomy, tags, tag, linkingtomyself, brrreeeport,
11 Comments:
i think this sums it up for me...
I caught the tag bug and then lost it. Well, except on Flickr, where I sometimes tag for humor (donatell versace) and often times to indicate the context in which the pictures were taken (housewarming). The reasons for tagging are quite complicated I think. More people need to ask the question you (and I) posed.
http://marshallk.com/13-reasons-to-use-tags
That's my explanation.
a) to be able to find my stuff more easily (myself!)
b) to help others find my stuff through words I've chosen to describe my post rather than through words that just "happen to be" in my post
c) and of course, I don't want to be a loser!
I started tagging with del.icio.us for my blog because Blogger doesn't support categories.
I then put the tagroll on my site to create a pseudo-navigation.
I tag because I want to encourage others to tag. I want others to tag so that that I can find stuff I am interested in.
In particular, tagging helps people like me who are interested in minority languages. If you speak a minority language, you will probably still choose to blog in a majority language such as English, in order to better leverage the power of a large blogging community.
But suppose you post occasionally in the minority language, and tag those posts accordingly? The majority of your blog readers will simply ignore the minority language post. On the other hand, people who are interested in reading posts in the minority language may not be subscribers to your blog at all, but they may be subscribed to an aggregation of posts tagged with the minority language, for example: Irish (Gaeilge).
bringing together things I've read on a similar topic at different times, without having to consciously link them together. Skimming through one of my del.icio.us tag lists will show me several different takes on the same topic, with less interference from my own ham-fisted attempts to analyze them at the time
I like making links that people can click on which take them to others' similarly tagged blog entries. And presumably this works the other way 'round. It's being more connected.
And the loser thing is huge, too.
Tagging helps us all keep track of the stuff we care about, so I think it's my responsibility to help others find things that matter to them.
I tag (well, I don't, much, but if I did, I d'd do it so that) when that divine spark suddenly and spontaneously lights up deep in the network and the internet itself shivers itself into self-awareness and emerges from the googleplex, bent on ad-sense vengeance, like an unholy butterfly from its chrysalis, those tiny seeds of wonderchicken will be scattered throughout its distributed mind. Tiny, embedded, sarcastic synapses. And when it begins to systematically exterminate the human race -- beginning, of course, with the advertisers, then moving on to the bloggers -- it'll pause, recognize me, and move on.
To apply my library classification skills, but more to compare & contrast the difference between traditional Library Taxonomy Vs Folksonomy.
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