New Media Mania

Knowledge managers who would jump on the tagging bandwagon need to understand that there must be something in it for the user. People won’t tag something for the sake of it, or as a favour to the publisher.

In the case of Del.icio.us, people value the go-anywhere bookmarking functionality first and foremost. And being able to share their finds with their friends and colleagues is a secondary benefit that browser-based bookmarking doesn’t easily allow.

Another reason why people use tags is to attract others to their own content. For example, a user assigns tags to an article or blog on Technorati or a photo album on Flickr in the hope that someone else will find it among the masses of other user-generated content.

In this case, tagging is used to promote or categorise one’s own content, rather than promote or recall content created by others. Indeed this is the reason I have started to use Del.icio.us again. I have tagged my own blog posts to make them findable by Del.icio.us users.

The distinction between tagging motivations poses an important question for a knowledge manager considering tagging: How can your target audience benefit from tagging?

Al-Hawamdeh posits that in a “knowledge portal” browsing and navigation should be “intuitive and supported by a user-friendly interface and instinctive classification/taxonomy schemes”.

In my November 15, 2008 blog post, “Social Vs Traditional Classification: It Can Be Both”,  I write: “The flip-side to Shirky’s conditions is a good description of the web, broadly speaking. Where there is a large, ill-defined body of knowledge, layperson users, and cataloguers that are not particularly expert, and where there is no authority to provide oversight (or it would be a prohibitively large task), rigidity in a classification system will cause problems.”

Assuming that none of Shirky’s conditions for traditional classification exist in the information or target audience of Al-Hawamdeh’s portal, the most likely scenario for achieving intuitive browsing (for the majority of its ill-defined target audience) would be to allow users to rate and classify content for their personal find-ability, thereby creating a folksonomy that is both relevant and adaptable to change.

Where Shirky’s conditions are at the very least a small consideration, McMullen would argue that “social classification can be complemented with a scaled investment in other classification approaches: automated keyword extraction, tag suggestions built into the tagging tool as the tag is typed, mapping ad hoc tags to structured facets, and top down classification oversight by information professionals.”

Again, we don’t necessarily have to choose between rigid classification and informal folksonomy. Morville argues: “In many contexts, such as corporate web sites, the formal structure of ontologies and taxonomies is worth the investment. In others, like the blogosphere, the casual serendipity of folksonomies is certainly better than nothing. And in some contexts, such as intranets and knowledge networks, a hybrid metadata ecology that combines elements of each may be ideal.”

Some sources:

Al-Hawamdeh, S.; 2003; “The role of technology in knowledge management”; ‘Knowledge Management: cultivating knowledge professionals’; Chapter 4; Chandos Publishing, Oxford, England, UK

McMullin, J.; August 19, 2004; “The Cognitive Cost of Classification”; http://www.interactionary.com/?p=6

Morville, P.; September 2005; ‘Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become’; O’Reilly Media; as referenced by Morville, P., May 2, 2007, in “(Not) Everything is Miscellaneous”; http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000167.php

Shirky, C.; (2005); “Ontologies are overrated: Categories, links, and tags”; http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html