Firstly I'd say there's a few places in which the term 'social' is used in 
particular specialised senses, including but not limited to:

* circumstances in which others' contributions directly influence one's 
own choice of term, and the extent to which this seeding effect exists on 
sites where that mechanism is available is a topic in itself

* circumstances in which tagging is explicitly applied for a shared aim, 
ie. to mark up resources for a group or community of individuals (I think 
this and the above possibly approach Pete's definition)

* circumstances in which what Alla Zollers calls 'performance tags' are 
used, ie. tags that act as a performance by the author - she and I did a 
study across a bunch of sites on this in spring. Stuff like chan or 
slashdot memes (failsiteisfail), expressive statements (SOfiveminutesago, 
artistsidsleepwith). Then there are linguistic phenomena; snowclones, 
characteristic multi-word expressions, intentionally bizarre 
orthography...

* Probably a load of others...

There's a point where tagging and microblogging link arms and wander off 
together.

However, I think of the term 'social' as primarily a novelty in the way in 
which people are thinking about metadata. There's no single fundamental 
difference (imho) between tagging and any other free-text input, but for 
whatever reason this discussion happened to hit at a time when the 
'social' epithet happened to be 'in'. So instead of examining variation in 
terms of inter-indexer consistency, there is/was an opportunity there to 
describe things without censure in terms of socially constructed 
negotiated language. But in practical terms there is no way that any 
string or utterance produced by a speaker (or contributor of written 
language) can have any other character. *Although, and this is important, 
the society in question could be the Society of Indexers*

So it's always been socially constructed and negotiated. If anything, this 
is a change of the researcher's perspective rather than any property of 
the system in question. It seems fairly clear from the literature that, if 
you're going to apply language, the audience is part of that process 
(indeed there is some fairly venerable research that discusses a process 
indistinguishable from tagging with exactly this in mind). AFAIK there 
isn't such a thing as external language- without- audience, although it is 
possible for my audience to consist of me, myself and I, which reduces the 
coherence of the expression for a general audience but improves it for me.

Or, in summary:

Language has multiple levels of use, from explicitly social, inspired by 
sociocultural circumstance or context (first define context), utilitarian, 
to baseline stuff that almost but not quite resembles classical semantics, 
but is just about near enough (see Wittgenstein for objections). If you 
look around different tagging sites for long enough you will see all of 
these, although since they all have a different set of users, communities 
and interfaces, there will be a lot of variation in where and whether 
these things appear.

As regards helping to make decisions about how tags are used, I absolutely 
think that it is helpful, if essentially impossible, to identify the 
'author's intent', their character, and the intended audience as well. 
Possibly we should take some sample datasets and see what can be made of 
it; perhaps Alla would let us use the joint dataset we developed? However, 
I'm not sure that this is the sort of thing you have in mind :-)

Cheers,

Em

------------------------------------------------------------
Emma Tonkin, Interoperability Focus Officer, UKOLN

On Sat, 3 May 2008, Pete Johnston wrote:

> Hi Liddy,
>
> I think I still think pretty much what I wrote back here :-)
>
> http://efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2006/11/the_social_in_s.html
>
> Tagging may be social or "non-social". It becomes "social" when it's - 
> to some degree at least - "negotiated" (to use the term Emma used in her 
> comment) through my membership of some group and my interaction with 
> other members of that group (e.g. seeing how they have tagged a 
> resource). Whether that group is a closed group of half a dozen 
> co-workers using a service on my organisation's Intranet or the open, 
> global membership of del.icio.us isn't really the point: they are both 
> "social" contexts.
>
> I consider my contributions to del.icio.us to be mainly "for" me i.e. my 
> primary motivation is to enable me to retrieve resources in the future, 
> and the consideration of sharing resources with other people is very 
> much a secondary one - but I still recognise the "social-ness" of the 
> process.
>
> And as I also say in that post, I consider the "simplicity/complexity" 
> axis to be distinct from the "social" one. Take services like 
> http://discogs.com/ or http://rateyourmusic.com/, where members create 
> relatively complex metadata, but there is a strong "social" dimension of 
> reviewing, correcting, extending, annotating etc the metadata created by 
> others.
>
> Pete
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: DCMI Social Tagging Community on behalf of Liddy Nevile
> Sent: Sat 5/3/2008 3:04 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: 'social' tagging
>
> Folks
>
> when we first set up this community, I had a bit of a problem with
> the word 'social' but people better than me said it was the way to go.
>
> I was not so sure because I think that tagging is perhaps when we
> have dreamt of but not dared expect - a practice that everyone can
> engage it. I think that tagging by 'ordinary' people is exactly what
> early DC work expected - I remember hearing a zillion times that we
> were after 'well-intentioned' metadata. I suspect we all got a bit
> precious and some of us even forgot that slogan. I'd like to revive it!
>
> I think there is a lot of work going on in the community with people
> trying to make sense of tagging, especially wondering why people tag
> and if their reasons make a difference.
>
> I would like us to think carefully again about calling it social
> tagging - I suspect that 'social' tagging has a theoretical
> implication - that it's tagging done 'for society' or 'by society'
> and we should not be careless about these terms. Different motivation
> might mean different ways of thinking about and using the process of
> tagging.
>
> What do you think???
>
> Liddy
>