Comments
Comment by ssp:
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In true style, Paul comments by placing a link to this page with his comment in delicious which I replicate here so it doesn’t escape those without X-Ray eyes.
I suppose one could have a full ‘discussion’ that way. I’m sure some geek is working on an aggregator already, but I’ll just go for convenience this time around.
Comment by g:
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I find tagging useful for myself, I tag more often on del.icio.us but it’s for me and over there my most abundant tag is: http://delicious.com/g/system:unfiled. It’s about 25% of my bookmarks, and that’s probably because I couldn’t think of a way to class the link without writing a long narrative with lots of blah_blah_blah…
This has been said before and I think it’s important. I noticed that normal people who use tags tend to write sentences like, "war in gaza" in the tag field and end up with "war" "in" "gaza" as three separate tags. A system that relies on a person to – continually – think about the limitations is weak. Now that's where semantics enter the tag discussion, which I’m sure the tagophiles hate. A search for "war" would yield a lot of results, fine. Would a search for "war in gaza" give uniquely relevant stuff without wading through acres of crap? It seems the system was designed for machine readable people, and one has to adapt to think in the same manner. Personally, when I write and talk I don’t say “hyphen” and “underscore” in between each word, or contractmysentenceintooneword.
Comment by g:
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Oh dear, I completely forgot about the Markdown filter.
Comment by ssp:
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Let’s say I’ve seen worse and corrected things as I saw fit. But we surely could open a ‘Victims of Markdown’ club… Oddly I always find the Markdown documentation abysmal. Whenever I need to look something up there the stuff I’m looking for is really well hidden while the obvious stuff is all over the place.
Comment by Mark Bernstein:
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I think you’re mistaken when you dismiss Dr. Marshall’s study as pseudoscientific. The methodology is unconventional, to be sure, but to my knowledge no known methodology addresses this question as well.
One could, of course, create a test case with a set of known images, each tagged by purportedly typical or representative users — typically undergraduate students. This assures that we know the entire universe of targets, and we can thus measure precision and recall conventionally. But are our tags representative of actual use by actual users? This is difficult to argue, and in general cannot be determined.
In Marshall’s study, we can only estimate precision and recall by assuming that she has, in fact, found all or nearly all the pertinent images (or, alternatively, estimating the number she has missed). This is problematic, to be sure. But we do have the benefit of actual tags created in the course of actual use, for whatever purpose actual users have in mind when they create tags.
For whatever weight it carries, Dr. Marshall is a senior researcher at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley lab, which she joined after many years at the legendary Xerox PARC. She’s twice won the Engelbart Prize. She’s regularly on program committees for JCDL, HT, CHI, WWW. She’s got a list of scientific publications as long as your arm.
Comment by ssp:
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@Mark:
Rest assured that I neither doubt nor know about Mrs Marshall’s proficiency at her profession.
All I saw – spelled out in exhaustive detail on the web page I linked to – looked like an enthusiastic ‘web 2.0’ user spending a lot of time digging into the photos available on flickr, taking samples on a single location and counting the numbers.
All this for a result which one should reach a priori from the conceptual weaknesses of how tagging is used and implemented in ‘web 2.0’ sites today.
Comment by ssp:
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Interesting further comment on the topic: Tags do work (for me, at least) which throws tags on delicious into the comparison.
Personally I think that tagging on delicious is bad as well as it suffers from the same conceptual flaws as flickr’s. But they have a few tweaks like tag autocompletion and suggestion of common tags for a link (is that a good or a bad thing? I gravitate towards the latter…) as well as tag grouping if a user is inclined to spend a lot of time on the site.
