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