Nono, I'm not talking about HTML tags, I mean tags used in the categorization of information. There's been lots of research on how to tag information correctly, but recently everyone's been making a big thing about how Flickr (yes, what an annoying name) lets people annotate photos with any tags they want. And lo, you get autocategorization by making, errr, the users do it. Examples: orange, Matterhorn.
Of course, the annoying thing about this is that I've been doing it all along on my personal photo gallery: orange, Matterhorn.
Mind you, the same thing applies to my recipes page: orange, pie.
OKOK, the actual real annoying thing is that I could have charged serious amounts of money had I thought about offering to other people too...
Re:No oranges
acme on 2004-10-03T10:09:28
Right. So the thing about user-provided tags is that they are provided by the user. This means they are the world as viewed by the user, and may not be entirely accurate or the way you might think. It mostly works though...Re:No oranges
jplindstrom on 2004-10-03T12:57:39
I know, I was just trying to highlight the weakness with this aproach:)
OTOH, I also think that getting people to spontaneously conform to a rigid markup structur a la http://www.dmoz.org/ or Yahoo is futile, they simply won't do it. So the net gain with user-provided informal is probably higher, like Flickr and http://del.icio.us/ does it.
I also think it should be relatively easy to perform some kind of statistical + semantic analysis of the user provided tags to enhance the meaning of them.
