I’m interested in tagging as it relates to PR and marketing and it will be a part of my panel tomorrow. Right now we’re talking about some of the bigger issues and implications of tagging.
If everything we ever knew is going on line – we need new ways of organizing our knowledge, ideas, information. Hence folksonomies. This is the premise of Dave’s upcoming (May 2007) book.
We are moving from ’sorting the laundry’ ie, physical knowledge – books, papers, etc – categories in bookstores. Now we can classify in more than one place, virtual. what does this do for the culture? the old ways of organizing knowledge, sources of authority, business, marketing?
What is a tag? They are attributes, metadate BUT in ordinary language, no control vocabulary, and applied by the users, not the owners of the information. Because we tag in public, there are wider cultural implications and social aspects. I can see tags … what you tagged, what the author tagged, who’s tagging my posts, etc.
People don’t like dealing with metadata and filing. Now there are services like Riya and others that can apply tags in bulk or based on user criteria. Also the work is now spread out – more than one person can tag photos on Flickr for example.
Our concepts of ownership of content has to change. For example, the readers own the Cluetrain Manifesto. Tags are ambiguous. We’re going to need better search technologies – for example, if I want to know who’s tagging what on which social networks – it gets tricky.
Any implications for physical space? Should bookstores and record stores change? Will newspapers change? Probably in some way. What if a public figure objects to how he or she is being tagged? Welcome to the Web.
