I thought this take on tagging might be of interest here in the context
of the current discussion...
Andy
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Head of Development, Eduserv Foundation
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-----Original Message-----
From: Closed mailing list for subject centre staff only
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Martin Poulter
Sent: 09 November 2006 14:37
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: hostile tagging
I've written this for the ILRT's newsletter but I thought it would be
relevant to some here. If I had a work blog I would post it there, but I
come up with these things only once in a while.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
The Hostile Tagging Phenomenon
In a number of different meetings I've been to recently, the Web 2.0
meme, especially tagging, has come up. Let the users tag each resource
with a word or phrase which goes into a searchable database, they say.
These tags are crucial to sites like the music database last.fm, where
an obscure musical term like "electroacoustica" can be applied by an
army of users to relevant music as it emerges, or where the labelling of
something as "relaxing" or "heavy" is the aggregate of thousands of
judgements rather than one person's. This system also brings out the
emotional associations of the music, such as "winter" or "shimmering".
But in other news, I've been reading about Kevin Federline. Until
yesterday as I write this, K-Fed (as he likes to be known) was happily
married to Britney Spears and, as a case-study in sexually-transmitted
celebrity, has managed to release a hip-hop album. It hasn't been
well-received.
Looking at the tags on Amazon, "Playing With Fire" scores high on the
tags "talentless", "loser" and "wannabe". Some users have used the tag
function to write micro-reviews, including "excrutiating dreck", "every
track ought to be hidden" and "music to make you long for the sweet
release of death". Over at last.fm, K-Fed is tagged "the worst thing
ever to happen to music" along with more obscene tags. "Failed at
musicianship and life in general" is a tag that K-Fed shares with the
Republican broadcaster Ann Coulter and the RnB musician R. Kelly.
From one perspective, this is an argument for professional cataloguers
who give meaningful labels. Who searching on "landfill" is going to be
grateful for finding K-Fed in the results?
On the other hand, would professional cataloguers ever be inspired to
use "vogon poetry" as a label? The move from ontology to "folksonomy" is
like a lot of internet changes: it reveals more of what people actually
want to see, though that might be more obscene and disgusting than what
we anticipated.
People who want to open up their sites to tagging should be warned,
though.
http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/56024
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