Tags as Keywords or ADD Inducer
Yesterday, while adding a tagging feature on the website, several questions arose regarding tags in general. How is relevance weighed when searching for a particular tag? How many tags does a post really need? Who should ultimately decide the relevance of each tag attached to a post?
It may not be as difficult when we're dealing with more objective items such as photos or video clips, although they're just as prone to being irrelevantly tagged according to a quick search Online: Learning Social Tag Relevance by Neighbor Voting. But what about blogs that are not on a social network and have no way of being voted by an audience or their service provider? Even within an individual social networked blog such as one from Blogger, it's not difficult to find tags that have very little relevance.
For example, if I searched for a tag named "Houston", one of the result I may find could be a post titled, "When I Was a Child I Was Afraid of the Cookie Monster." The actual post may deal with childhood trauma with some references to Sesame Street, Television, PBS, and the author's place of residence at the time. But since the post has been tagged with "Houston" along with more relevant tags like "Childhood", "Sesame Street" and "Television", my tag search would end up finding this post.
I believe there are three reasons why this occurs. First, there are too many tags allowed per post if not unlimited. Tags are not weighed within each post. All the tags for a post are weighed equally without rank, meaning the tag "Childhood" is just as relevant to the post as the tag "Houston" is. Lastly, user defined tags are subjective and carelessly added (one more reason to limit the number of tags), and they're not directly allowed for the public to rank their relevancy.
Of course, this all depends on what people think of tags in general. Some may believe tags are simply a way of catering to the ADD ridden public where one could be reading about the movie Thirst and go on reading about garlic the next minute. And some may regard tags as being more like keywords, where by using tags aids in reclaiming its contents when searched for in the future. However, in reality they're both; likely their strongest and most useful attribute, albeit unbalanced at the moment.
- Posted by Chanhee
- April 20, 2010
- TOP
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