Tagging - individualism and simplicity

What I really like about tagging is its freeform individualism and simplicity. Most categorisation systems contain vast centralised taxonomies. These systems tend either to be to overly complicated or not granular enough to be of practical use.

Allowing users to create their own taxonomies using single words and then merging them into one public space is a great idea. Tagging throws away hierarchal structures which are fundamental to other categorisation systems like directories. It also ditches centralised vocabularies which so often seem important in creating precision language for searching and sorting.

This simplicity is not a weakness but a strength as it allows users to easily generate content for trusted networks. These network sites like wikipedia, Flickr and del.icio.us can then grow at amazing rates creating real depth of meaning.

Using tagging anyone can design a series of words to describe content. While individualism is catered for most people collaboratively re-align their choice of words.

There are many who believe that this type of collaborative categorization (folksonomy) has its drawbacks. Alex Wright wrote a nice piece about the debate where he describes both the good and bad of collaborative categorization. Although the information architecture debate about precision and the authority of sources is interesting it does not address interoperability.

Interoperability could be one factor which makes tagging very successful. Joining together traditional hierarchal taxonomies is very difficult, but the loosely coupled nature of tagging allows you to connect disparate systems without weeks of analysis and mapping.

The speed at which different systems can be joined together may be the one thing which counters the whole precision and authority debate. The true power of tagging can only be released by the API architecture of the sites providing these services.

I have started to use API’s to pull different tagging based services into my blog the first is del.icio.us which now provides the links section of this blog. In the future I am also going to integrate the tag API’s from Flickr and Technorati.