Issues with Tagging

Social Bookmarking with Delicious

Use it to remember web resources for yourself

Contribute to the shared folksonomy (something like wikipedia)

Make use of that shared folksonomy to find information and associations

Tagging-- The user applies a set of words (tags) to an article.

Issues with Tagging

1. Synonyms -- Joe finds a great article about Macintosh computers and tags it Mac. Suzy finds another great article about Macintosh computers and tags it Apple.

System computed "related tags" helps here.

Shirky argues that most terms are not exact synonyms and that the differences are often important. What connotation do the following terms have:

film, movie

queer, gay

2.A tag with multiple meanings-- A category is "noisy" because people use it for different concepts, e.g.,

Apple

Java

These problems don't occur in traditional systems because the experts decide before-hand what thee category is. The down-side is users are forced to fit items into the pre-defined categories, and as new terminology evolves, users have no recourse but to wait for the experts.