Pew Internet & American Life Project
Tagging Play
Forget Dewey and His Decimals, Internet Users Are Revolutionizing the Way We Classify Information - and Make Sense of It
Just as the internet allows users to create and share their own media, it is also enabling them to organize digital material their own way, rather than relying on pre-existing formats for classifying information.
A December 2006 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 28% of internet users -- and 7% on any typical day -- have tagged or categorized online content such as photos, news stories or blog posts.
These are people who responded "yes" to the following question: "Please tell me if you ever use the internet to categorize or tag online content like a photo, news story, or a blog post." The survey wording was designed to capture the growing use of tagging on sites such as http://del.icio.us/ (a site for sharing browser bookmarks), http://www.flickr.com/ (a photo sharing site), http://youtube.com/ (a video sharing site) and http://technorati.com/ (the blog search engine).
Because it advances and personalizes online searching, tagging has been classified by some as a "Web 2.0" hallmark. Traditionally, search on the web (or within websites) has been done by using keywords. Tagging is a kind of next-stage search phenomenon -- a way to mark, store, and then retrieve web content that users have already found valuable and want to keep track of. It is, of course, more personalized and not designed to be the all-inclusive system that Melvil Dewey tried to create in 1876 with his decimal-based scheme that, in much revised form, is still widely used in library classification.
In a forthcoming book Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, David Weinberger, describes how people are putting ideas, information and knowledge together now that the digital age has encouraged alternatives to organizing information like the Dewey Decimal system. An online interview with Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and a prominent blogger, is featured at the end of this article.
How tagging works
Tagging is the process of creating labels for online content. The mechanics are simple on most tag-centered websites. After creating an account on a site like flickr.com you can upload your own pictures to the web site and label them as you see fit – for instance, labeling a picture with a setting sun in it as "sunset." You can also search the site using keywords and, when you find photos posted by others that you like enough to want to retrieve later, you can apply your own tags or labels to them. That might mean that you call someone else's picture "sunset" even though he originally labeled it "clouds." Then, from any internet-connected computer you can go back to flickr.com and find all the material you have tagged -- both yours and the material from others that you've labeled your own way.
Not only can tags be personally useful to people who want easier ways to retrieve information and content that appealed to them, but they also have a social dimension. Your tags on flickr are added to the millions of other labels on the site; that allows flickr to organize information better for other searchers who use those keywords -- making this a classic example of bottom-up building of categories instead of top-down imposition of categories.
Your tags also allow flickr to highlight the most popular tags. These "tag clouds" show you the material that was tagged by others and they usually show the most popular tags by increasing the font size and boldness of the type as flckr does here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/.
Since this is the first time the Project has asked about this activity, our data do not permit us to measure the rate at which the trend is growing. As with other emerging Web 2.0 activities, there is also debate about what should be officially considered tagging -- what sets it apart as a distinct activity, say, from creating a browser bookmark. To add to the complexity of the issue, there are probably people who have created a tag who would use a different term for the activity. For example, some sites invite users to apply "labels" to content and don't use the word "tag." Other sites make tagging so effortless that people might not be fully conscious they are doing it.
Who the taggers are
Taggers look like classic early adopters of technology. They are more likely to be under age 40, and have higher levels of education and income.
Taggers are also considerably more likely to have broadband connections at home. Men and women are equally likely to be taggers, while online minorities are a bit more likely than whites to be taggers.
Many organizations are making it easier and easier to tag internet content. Gmail users can label their email content; Amazon users can apply the labels of their choosing to books and other published material. Yahoo has also added web applications that make it easy to tag and store web pages. Some sites have buttons on their web pages that allow their content to be stored on tagging sites with a simple click of a mouse.
There are even reports that some web users have now designated tagging sites as their home page, making these sites at least nominal competitors to big media companies that hope users will start their online experiences with them.
Tagging sites are getting more popular
Data from Hitwise, the web-tracking firm, show that tagging sites like flickr and del.icio.us have gained in popularity as internet users become aware of them. The data are presented as a percentage of all web traffic.
Del.icio.us is a site where people can tag their website bookmarks and, again, share their tags with others.
For more information about the Pew Internet Project's survey design and methodology, see pewinternet.org.
Why Tagging Matters: An Interview with David Weinberger
In his forthcoming book, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, Weinberger describes how radical it is for people to move away from hierarchical classifications of information like the Dewey Decimal System, to individually- and group-arranged systems.
In Melvil Dewey's world, all information is divided into ten major topical categories that might have made perfect sense to well-educated Westerners who shared Dewey's frames of reference, but perhaps not to others.1 For instance, Dewey assigned the 800-899 block of numbers to literature and then assigned numbers 800-889 to American, European and classical languages. Thus, he squeezed every other bit of literature into the 10 remaining slots. That means Russian literature didn't even get its own whole number. It comes under 891.7, amidst East Indo-European and Celtic literatures.
It was also perfectly logical to Dewey that he list material relating to pets in the "technology" block of numbers in the 600s. Here's how he worked that out:
600 Technology
630 Agriculture and related technologies
636 Animal husbandry
636.7 Dogs
636.8 Cats
In the 21st Century world of user-generated categories and meaning, this does not make as much sense as perhaps it once did. Weinberger has thought through the many ways this changes people's relationship to information. So, I traded emails with him on the subject and here's the result:
Q: What started the current interest in tagging?
Weinberger: The bookmarking site http://del.icio.us hit a nerve [in 2003] when it let users tag Web sites with a word or two so that they could find those sites later. And http://www.flickr.com hit the same nerve when it adopted tagging as a way to let people organize the photos they posted.
But the nerve was there, ready to be struck, because of two factors:
First, tagging lets us organize the vastness of the Web -- and even our email, as Gmail has shown -- using the categories that matter to us as individuals. You may want to tag, say, a Stephen King story as "horror," but maybe to me it's "ghost story" and to a literature professor it's "pop culture." Tagging lets us organize the Net our way.
Second, tagging is social. Tags used to be called "keywords," and they've been with us for a long time. But only recently have we been making them public. That has big effects. By searching for a tag we can find material others have discovered ahead of us: At Amazon's "most popular tags" page, a search for things tagged "horror" turns up almost three thousand books and movies.
Tagging also allows social groups to form around similarities of interests and points of view. If you're using the same tags as I do, we probably share some deep commonalities.
And, by looking over the public field of tags, we can see which tags are most frequently used and how they relate. Those patterns are called "folksonomies" -- it's a play on the word "taxonomies." Folksonomies reveal how the public is making sense of things, not just how expert cataloguers think we ought to be thinking.
Q: Why do you think Internet users are drawn to tagging?
Weinberger: It's really useful. Compare your traditional computer system to organize your digital photos to using a tagging system. Instead of having to stick a photo into a single folder -- say, "trips 2006" -- you can easily tag it as "Italy," "anniversary," "sunset," "mountains," and "no kids." You can assemble instant virtual albums of all your anniversary photos, or all your photos of all your trips to Italy, etc.
There's an altruistic appeal to tagging as well. Tagging at public sites can give you a sense that you're adding to a shared stream of knowledge. At del.icio.us, or other such sites, tag a page "robotics" and you know that it's automatically added to the list of pages tagged that way, so anyone else interested in that topic can find it.
Q: So, there are benefits beyond the individual.
Weinberger: Absolutely. Maybe the most interesting thing about tagging is that we now have millions and millions of people who are saying, in public, what they think pages and images are about. That's crucial information that we can use to pull together new ideas and information across the endless sea we've created for ourselves.
Q: Does tagging create problems?
Weinberger: What doesn't? Tags work because they're so simple, but because they're so simple, they can be ambiguous. The tag "roman," for example, might refer to an Italian fountain, the director Roman Polanski, or the French word for "novel." So, there's a possibility for misunderstanding. And if you search for photos tagged "San Francisco," you may not see photos tagged "sf" or "Golden Gate." So, if you need to find everything about a topic, you often can't rely on tags.
More broadly, some worry that folksonomies can be a type of "tyranny of the majority," in which the prevalent group's way of thinking about the world overwhelms the local and the quirky. That's something to watch out for, but by analyzing tag sets we can also build a tag thesaurus that knows that the tag "roman" may be equivalent to the tag "novel" in some circumstances.
Q: What's the future of tagging?
Weinberger: Because it's useful when there's lots of information and the information is truly meaningful to individuals, it'll be adopted more and more widely. But we're also going to invent new ways to harvest tagging. Flickr, for example, is already able to cluster photographs by subject with impressive accuracy just by analyzing their tags, so that photos of Gerald Ford are separated from photos of Ford Motor cars. We'll also undoubtedly figure out how to intersect tags with social networks, so that the tags created by people we know and respect have more "weight" when we search for tagged items. In fact, by analyzing how various social groups use tags, we can do better at understanding how seemingly different worldviews map to one another.
Notes
1The general format of the Dewey Decimal System is as follows:
000s Information (now including computer science) and general works
100s Philosophy and psychology
200s Religion
300s Social sciences
400s Language
500s Science
600s Technology
700s Arts and recreation
800s Literature
900s History and geography
Read a good general description of the integers of the Dewey Decimal system.