Pensieri di un lunatico minore

Tagged: clue

Nick Santilli asks where’s the easy access to tagging in OS X?, and while he spends a few minutes talking about whether it’s desirable or not, he seems to miss the point—but just barely.

We tag bookmarks, photos, applications, blog posts, and on and on and on.

Who is this “we” kimosabe? I mean, I use tagging, but “we” are not typical. In the first sentence he hits on the underlying problem with his argument. Who is “we”? Who, specifically, are we targeting and talking about?

I suppose the tried and true way of doing things (hierarchical folders housing documents that you have to drill-down to find) continues to reign supreme. Is tagging at the operating system level just too ambiguous for users to grasp? My feeling is that if it were made more accessible, a definite change would begin to occur in the way people accessed their hard-drive-based files.

It might, but it might be that the mental model that people would need for tagging to make sense simply isn’t one that many people have. Folders make sense to most people. They’ve seen a file cabinet, and seen drawers and little manilla folders. What they’ve never seen is a room where you spit out words and hope that someone hands you a pile of papers back with what you want. This makes it hard for the average person to understand. Trust me, I’ve tried explaining it to people, and failed miserably. Now, that’s not to say that there isn’t some way to do it, but I suspect it’ll be quite different than what you see on delicious, for example.

When I quickly took a peek at Flickr and the tags that people had added on some new photos, I found that out of 20 of the newest photos one had two (2) tags, one had four (4) tags, one had eight (8) tags, and seventeen had none. That means 85% had no tags what-so-ever, and averaged out to 0.8 tags-per-image, but 57% of those tags were on one image.

What this tells me is that most people don’t tag. It’s not a scientific result, but it is a data point, and it’s one that’s likely more representative of the “average” person than anything else. Flickr seems to be populated with a lot of regular people, rather than geeks, and so the numbers wouldn’t be as skewed as what you might get elsewhere.

For tagging to take off, the concept needs to be clarified and representable in a metaphor that people can relate with. I’m not sure that’s possible, although certainly people are trying. In addition, I think much more is to be gained by the judicious use of latent semantic analysis in finding document relations than in expecting the average user to tag their own documents.

Just a thought of mine, though.