Customer Reviews

Tagging: People-powered Metadata for the Social Web

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This was a really good book. It wasn't what I expected it to be. But it was a worthwhile read. I picked it up because I do a fair amount of work writing book reviews and making guides and booklists on Amazon. And Amazon now lets guys like me create tags for the books I review and include in guides and lists. I kind of expected this book would have talked a little bit about the Amazon system of tagging. Nope. But that's OK. It's still a good book. It includes seven chapters and three appendices:

1. What is tagging?
2. The value of tagging
3. Tagging system architecture
4. Tags, metadata, and classical systems
5. Navigation and visualization
6. Interfaces
7. Technical design
A. Case study: social bookmarking
B. Case study: media sharing
C. Case study: personal information management

Tagging is a form of information that is really starting to take root in our computer systems and online systems. I first experienced it back in 1998 when I purchased a copy of Lotus Organizer to use as my Personal Information Manager (PIM) when practicing law. The program allowed me to cross-reference the many lists I had created in its database. I thought it was really cool back then.

I was just getting into creating Web sites in 1998, too. And I found the tagging features in Lotus Organizer enabled me to do with the data in my database what I was doing with my Web pages in my Web sites. Basically tagging is another name for hyperlinking. Nothing more and nothing less. A tag will take you to a new idea, concept, data item, data page, or database. It's a springboard that will take you to information.

This book points out that tagging is a new form of information management as it relates to personal organization, information architecture, and online communities. I suppose my Lotus Organizer program is an example of the first, and Amazon's system is an example of the last. So is it really all that new?

All in all, this book explains the value of tagging. It's a guide to what, how and why to tag. Each chapter ended in a list of bullet points called a Summary. I liked this feature very much since it helped me skim through the book quickly. 5 stars!

Participating in a community, sharing our interests, and contributing to the collective good are all fundamentally human motivations, Smith says, and social tagging systems tap into these.

If you use the Web a lot, the stream of information you navigate sometimes seems like a tsunami. Besides emails and RSS feeds, your digital stream can include social networking sites, photos from your friends, links from Del.icio.us, and Twitter tweets.

Tagging these online resources can help you make sense of your stream. If you use tags now, this book will show you ways to juice your game, and will likely point you to new resources. If you don't use tags, this book explains how tagging can help, and how to get started.

And if you're a web architect, Gene Smith walks you through the things you should consider when designing tagging system.

I have worked on a variety of applications and have participated in conferences where it is clear we all have an incredible amount of data to manage.
It seems tagging is the new means of organizing your data, but it is also equally clear to most of us that this feels very unstructured.

This book is sure to be a seminal book, discussing the early years of tagging. It deals with the basics:
a. What it is
b. Why we want to do it
c. Some various methods and structures for tagging and how we would use it.
d. Examples of the components of tagging, why and where to use them
e. Some code nuts and bolts of how to approach tagging.

Finally there are some real life examples
1. Social bookmarking
2. Media sharing
3. Personal information management.

This book is easy to read and quickly gets you up to speed on some of the issues associated with tagging.

Essentially it says, you need to decide what you want to do, before deciding on the type of tagging you would use.

It also clearly leaves the reader realizing this is just the beginning..

I think that this book creates a new specialization in the science of metadata and controlled vocabularies: tagging. The book is very well wrote and contains very well illustrations and diagrams. But the most important of all is that this book explains and illustrates the emerging of a new information science discipline: tagging, or, as the author says "people-powered metadata".

I appreciated how well thought out this book was in its presentation. It's a very useful book with real world examples. However, it is more than that because it also outlines useful principles to think about, consider and make choice about when considering how to use Tagging.

While not the primary purpose of the book, "tagging" offers the most user-friendly intro I've ever read into the endlessly obtuse topic of metadata. And while the book is a few years old, reading it at the beginning of 2012 I find it still up-to-the-minute for most readers. And he's more than willing to discuss the shortfalls of any aspect of this technology: he's very fair and even-handed.

Gene Smith has done a great job in showing how tagging functions within the broader context of metadata. I recommend the book highly.

It's very clear and simply written, and at the same time complete and exhaustive. Good purchase.