Tag Categories

Tag categories are not scientific. Melvil Dewey, of Dewey Decimal System fame, would be rolling in his grave at the free form, disorganized categorization of all this random tagging. How I catalog and group my bookmarks is going to be different from everyone else. And my classifications are going to run the gamut. Most will correspond to actual subject matter, but some tags will relate to my opinions, or my intentions for the content. A blog post about social media would get certainly get tagged "socialmedia" but I might also tag it "review" if I intend to write a review of the post. I might also tag it "writing" if I happen consider it an exceptional example of the use of language. But these personal tags would have little meaning to anyone else. This loose, personal, unscientific tagging process is sometimes referred to as a "folksonomy" in contrast to formal taxonomies like the biological categories (kingdom, phylum, class, etc.).

It's true that the organic nature of tags will generate some noise. Tags will mean different things to different people, not to mention inherent confusion between homonyms. If I'm an botanist and tag something "root" I probably mean something very different than a system administrator would for the same tag. But noise is okay as long as we have systems that can filter it out. One of the filtering systems of del.icio.us is context. If, for instance, I list out bookmarks tagged "root" I see related tags; some refer to operating systems, and others go to recipes for making great root bear.

Navigating the potential messiness of tags is a small price to pay for the benefits they create. Sharing, discovery and recommendation are a few of these benefits, but smartness is another.