There can be no arguments about it, machine tags are cool and they solve problems. And now they work in WordPress with bSuite too (svn only, for the moment).

It’s not just because flickr popularized them that I like them, though it helps and you should definitely look at that stuff:

• The announcement
• Excitement from O’Reilly Radar, ProgrammableWeb, and Dan Catt (who championed the concept at flickr, I think).

Part of what I like about machine tags is that they bring some more structure (but not too much) to the folksonomic ecosystem. I’m not sure how many of the 292 named flickr mashups use machine tags, but there’s a lot of possibility in them.

For my part, I added machine tag support to bSuite because Scriblio needed it. And it was a message on the Scriblio mail list that kicked me into gear to make it work.

I loved this quote from Dave Young when I first found it, and I love it more now:

Talk to the customer in the language of the customer about what matters to the customer. Bad advertising is about you, your company, your product or your service. Good advertising is about the customer, and how your product or service will change their world.

Read that again, but replace the relevant bits with “user” or “patron” and “your library” or “your databases.”

The point of all this in a post from Jessamyn about understanding what users understand.

Part of the problem is that the information landscape and our behaviors — well, our users’ behaviors anyway — have changed faster than our systems and services. That is, the value of the library is distributed among our catalogs, institutional repositories, digital archives, many dozens of databases, and thousands of ejournals. We struggle for ways to differentiate between them when all our patrons really want is “information.”

My friend Joe wrote:

Younger people, naturally, find all of this equivocating silly. They know where they are going to look for information, and it sure as heck isn’t the library — at least not the library as it currently exists. In a healthy way, perhaps, they don’t make distinctions about information. They use it, then move on.

I doubt there are many who praise the complexity, the dis-integration of our online services. Yet because of limitations of our technology and, perhaps, just the enormity of the task, these problems persist.

That’s why I like John Kupersmith’s pages of “library terms that users understand,” where you’ll find a quick guide to usability tested terms and other goodies. Because, yes, one of the biggest problems we face has nothing to do with the technology.

communication design, customer, dave young, future libraries, john kupersmith, language, lib20, libraries, library, library 2.0, targeting, taxonomy, terminology, user expectations, user knowledge

David Weinberger at Many-to-Many pointed me to Tom Coates’ post about different schools of thought regarding tags. Coates has been thinking about tags as keywords, annotations. Thats how I’ve been using and thinking about tags too, but some people have different ideas.

…At the end of the argument I said to Joshua that it was almost like he was treating tags as folders. And he replied, exasperated, that this was exactly what they were.

Exasperation aside, Coates is pretty sure that Joshua’s view is loosing currency and the keywords view is growing.

Wienberger offers this explanation: we use tags as folders to organize things for ourselves, but we use tags as keywords as a way to contribute to the social understanding of things. That’s what Yahoo’s Social Search is trying to leverage.

Related: Google’s War On Hierarchy.

tags: annotating, annotations, culture war, david weinberger, folders, folksonomy, keywords, schools of thought, search, social search, tag, tag cloud, tagging, tags, taxonomy, tom coates, yahoo social search