Tim Bray:
Are there any questions you want to ask, or jobs you want to do, where tags are part of the solution, and clearly work better than old-fashioned search? I really want to believe that tagging is big, a game-changer, but the longer I go on asking this question and not getting an answer, the more nervous I get.
Are there any questions you want to ask, or jobs you want to do, where tags are part of the solution, and clearly work better than old-fashioned search? I really want to believe that tagging is big, a game-changer, but the longer I go on asking this question and not getting an answer, the more nervous I get.
You may be right, Tim, but I can think of one example that may be pretty important. Have you ever searched Google News instead of Google Web Search because you were hoping to find something that matters right now, not something that may or may not have been indexed several days ago? In my experience, generally, that search fails, and then I forget what I was searching for, and then I'm back to whatever I was doing.
Tagging
can change this by creating more dynamic, relevant connective tissue
with the conversation on a topic that matters at a specific moment in
time. For example, if I stumble on an article about Sony's PSP
and realize that I want to know more about what people are saying about
the PSP right now, then I should be able to dive right from that point
into a wider discussion about the PSP. Because people are
actively tagging with the "PSP" tag, then this connection should be
very fluid.You can see this starting to happen in a rudimentary way already. If you click on PSP on this article, you go to a page of links about Sony's PSP. The PSP page includes the stories that The Industry Standard has recently written about Sony's PSP. Following that are the current links to information people have tagged with "PSP" using both del.icio.us and FURL.
Then, compare those results with what you get when you search Google for PSP. Try again searching Google News.
The level of relevance in this context is significantly better for a certain type of user experience. Rather than start from scratch with a new intent, interrupting information consumption, tags enable a fluid transition of information discovery. I won't claim that this will damage Google's importance or the need for search, but it opens up a sort of new dynamic...well, more like an old dynamic that became more and more difficult as information began to flood the World Wide Web.
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