I don’t like tags
October 20, 2008Okay, tags are better than categories or folders because they are much more flexible. But still; I don’t like them.
Take for instance my notebook application Evernote. I told you about Evernote in a previous posting. It is the absolute perfect notebook, synchronising my notes between my netbook, the Internet and my smartphone. I keep my personal and work related diary with Evernote and I put there every little piece of information I come across.
In Evernote, you create so called “notebooks”, like major categories in which you put your notes. And then you can tag every note with as many tags as you want. For me, this is pretty useless because I rather use the powerful search engine included in Evernote. It searches all your notes, recognises even words in pictures, embedded PDFs or handwritten notes. If I want to look up a particular note, I remember a few words that belong to the text - I type them into the search engine and off we go. Powerful search engines are a real handy thing, not tags.
I don’t like tags because you have to consciously think of labels to tag your stuff with - and in most cases that’s forced and pointless anyway. At the OU we have to collect our pieces of work in ePortfolios. Now, I’ve never worked with ePortfolios before … and I already love them! I love the reflective style of working - but there’ll be a text of it’s own about portfolio work. Anyway, one of the necessities is that we have to tag our files with as many tags as we want, but also some of eight default categories: skills, reflection, critique, proactivity, practice-related, communication-related, technology-related, research-related. What’s the point? I will never look for my files with the help of these tags. I might remember an approximate point in time when I wrote the files, so I might look for them chronologically. Or I run a search on the title - or even better, if that’s supported by the software, a full text search.
I don’t like tags, I like search engines. Full stop. :)
24. October 2008 um 23:41
I don’t like tags either.
1. Tags tend to be ambiguous. (”paris” — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_(disambiguation))
2. Tags depend on a specific implementation, taxonomy and/or naming scheme (which not all editors might be aware of). That’s especially true if you try to avoid point 1. (”france/paris”, “paris, france”, “paris” + “france”, “location:fr/paris”, …)
3. Tags are very unintuitive to use if you have to guess them out of thin air. (”jfk”, “john f. kennedy”, “kennedy, john f.”, “kennedy”)
4. Tags are hard to use in a consistent manner. (Did I add a “sports” tag to all occurrences of the “baseball” tag?)
5. Tags are lost in translation. (”paris”, “pariz”, “parys”, “parigi”, …)
6. I have the feeling that I don’t understand tags at all.
I like to think of tags as a way to add an object to multiple (sub-)categories of a huge hierarchical meta data taxonomy. For instance, I (try to) sort all of my photos into three different taxonomies which are like three different “views” onto the data: location, set and (pictured) person. That makes it pretty easy to find all images of Guillaume (person) that were taken in Paris, France (location) during a “weekend trip” (set) in April 2006 (image meta data). The mass of all photos becomes some kind of 4-dimensional cluster (date, location, set, person) in which I can find specific objects by filtering one or more dimensions using a condition (location=Paris, France). Every object for that all applied conditions are fulfilled (the intersection), is part of the subset I wanted to expose.
But I doubt that this is the “correct” way to think about tags.
25. October 2008 um 05:54
Thanks for your brilliant comment! You managed to sort of systemize my gut feeling about tags. I share your opinion. :)