That guy on the left was me today. The blog system I'm enrolled in added "tags" about a month ago. By the definitions given, I faithfully went through my entire blog and added "tags" (words or phrases that apply to the content). After this labor intensive job was done, I wondered if I had "done it right", because I had no idea what tags were.
My thought process immediately went to organization and wanted to narrow the tags down to a handful of common words. Boy, was I wrong and relieved to find I didn't have to do that at all. Maureen McCabe who keeps reassuring me when I get my pantyhose in a bundle, untied the knots once again. She sent a link to a fantastic article on tags and what they are.
I had never heard of Shirky before and laughed at the name. Blogdom is full of weird names (although Shirky appears to be his legal surname) describing very intelligent people. It's almost an "in your face" thing to be intelligent but not stuffy. These techie people are accomplishing what my generation of flower children failed to do when we were running around with peace signs and burning articles of clothing. Most of us became establishment people, the yuppies, but the X and Y generation have figured it out. The packaging isn't so important to them as the content.
Clay Shirky's explanation of tags lost me when the word ontology was introduced. Then he used the periodic table of elements as the best example of organization and classification. Hmmm. It's been a lot of years since I memorized the table and I don't remember a thing about it. Later the explanation clarified completely. Prior to the internet, information came in finite quantities. Even the massive Library of Congress had a finite amount of books. Finite articles can be filed and categorized. They can be put on shelves. They can be organized.
The internet, however, is fluid and the information is difficult to traditionally categorize and shelve. The net gives us the ability to find a page in a book on science that applies to family functioning if it is tagged as such. As with my blog, I might talk about the Foshay Tower one day and flowers the next, yet the traditional category is real estate. My content and links may not always fit one category. Web organization gets messy. It's all over the place.
Shirky's premise is that the internet has no shelves, only links to information that fit with the content of this article. The ability to search is created by tags. So, I can have tags that are the same subject as a gazillion others and the tags will combine us together for that specific subject. Another subject will shuffle the pot and a different group of articles will come together. If my blog was shelved by category, the person searching for the Foshay Tower would not find my blog, but searching by tags would possibly bring my blog to his/her attention.
By the time I finished the article, I felt like I had revisited the confusion of Bruno Bettelheim's books from my college days but came away with a deeper understanding of what tags are. I also was reassured that I didn't have to "organize" my tags into some meaningful system. I can let them be what they will be! They will be fluid just like the internet!
(c) Bonnie Erickson 2006
