28% of Online Americans Have Used the Internet to Tag Content Forget Dewey and His Decimals, Internet Users are Revolutionizing the Way We Classify Information – and Make Sense of It
9 pages; PDF.

The report mentions Dewey Decimal Classification and includes an interview with the always interesting David Weinberger.

Quick comments from Gary. Comments from ResourceShelf Contributing Editor, Dan Giancaterino, are included at the bottom of this post.

1) We’ve always believed that tagging could potentially be VERY useful for individuals (personal information management) and small groups (e.g., a group working on a class project). It might also become useful for groups who use the same language/terminology to describe an item. For example, scientists and the use of tagging service like Connotea.

However, it might be a different story for the masses. Can or will tagging help the masses do a thorough search, potentially unearth useful content and, most importantly, save the end user time, effort, and aggravation?

Today, if you look at the most popular tags on del.icio.us a majority are technology-based topics. Are non-techies not tagging, at least publicly? Will these people tag and share publicly or only tag for personal info management? It’s a wait-and-see situation.

2) Why is it that whenever tagging is discussed, only the Dewey Decimal Classification is mentioned. Someone should point out that other classification systems exist and, as we’ve said before, there are differences between verbal subject headings (LCSH) and classification schemes like Dewey, UDC, and Library of Congress Classification.

3) Since tagging is done without structure, some users might describe an item with one tag, while others might use 20 or more. Do we need some basic requirements for public tag sharing? Again, what you do for yourself or in a small group is of course, your call.

4) Where does proper name authority control fit into this mix? Same name, different people? Same name, various spellings? Various names of a company? Again, all of this depends on the person doing the tagging (skills, time to get it done, etc.). What about location? If a image or document or image is tagged “Portland” does that it’s about Portland (for example the school system) or of Portland (a skyline image). Is it Portland, OR or Portland, ME?

5) From the report:

The act of tagging is likely to be embraced by a more mainstream population in the future because many organizations are making it easier and easier to tag internet content. For instance, Gmail users can label their email content and Amazon users can apply the labels of their choosing to books and other published material.

Again, this might be the case (only time will tell) but also reads like personal information management than mass sharing.

6) Vivisimo’s/Clusty’s management talks about letting a document speak for itself; clustering dynamically might be of more value than tagging (for the masses). Vivisimo calls it post-retrieval clustering vs. pre-retrieval tagging. Can clustering do a better job (letting the document speak for itself) of bringing like things together (for a successful, complete, and fast search) than tagging? Don’t forget that clustering using a controlled database is possible and offers more options, as seen with ClusterMed, where you can cluster on specific PubMed fields.

Finally. Ask.com* offers (with Zoom) related search suggestions to help save end users time finding related items and perhaps items they might not know about. In other words, using clustering and related search technologies as an info discovery tool

7) The Pew report makes no mention of spamming and spammers. How difficult is it for spammers to tag all items with the most popular tags? If/when tagging becomes even more mainstream as predicted in the report, will spammers become even more of an issue? It seems that as soon as someone solves the problem, another way of spamming is always found and exploited. Danny Sullivan has written on tag spam. Let’s also not forget that back in the early days of web search webmasters were allowed to use uncontrolled meta “keywords.” That feature, after a couple of years, was abused so much that it’s no longer useful. We also posted few weeks agotwo new research showing how a very useful feature on eBay (reputation management) is being gamed.

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