Karen Coyle wrote:
> databases of "items so useless we put them in storage." And because most
> books have tags, one tends to add tags as part of the social aspect of
> belonging to LibraryThing.
Actually, I think that users add tags not because most books have tags,
but as a method of _organizing their libraries_. Now, they could do
this for their own personal use, or to show their libraries to other
people ('social aspect'). (I suspect that most library thing users,
myself included, are motivated in large part by a desire to show off
their book collections publically).
But I think that's an important point for most uses of tags we've seen.
Users are adding tags for their _own_ purposes, to keep track of their
own stuff on flickr, or delicious, or librarything. The larger aggregate
social advantage is not the reason users are tagging---or at least is
not enough to motivate them to tag.
The reason nobody tags in WorldCat--or Amazon--isn't, I'd argue, because
there isn't a critical mass, it's because there's _no reason to_. What
good does it do me? I tag in flickr (librarything; delicious) so I can
find my own pictures (books; bookmarked urls) amongst all my own
pictures (books; bookmarked urls)---even if nobody else tags but me and
I never look at their tags, it's still useful to me.
Maybe once there is that 'critical mass', more users may start tagging
for 'social purpose'. I don't know if there's any research on that,
although I know I've seen that suggested as a (very interesting)
research topic. But I bet even once there is a 'critical mass', many
users keep tagging only for it's own individual benefit either. The
aggregate social benefit is an epiphenomenon. Which you'll never get to
if there isn't some individual benefit to tagging in isolation to begin
with.
There is for flickr, delicous, librarything. All of these are things
where people have their own collection of stuff they need to keep
organized, and they do this for tags. Amazon and WorldCat? Users do not
have or want their own collection of stuff in there.
Do users have their own collection of stuff in our library catalog
world? Well, we could provide a bibliographic reference keeping utility,
integrate it into the catalog (among other places), let users tag their
references to keep track of them, and when the users have tagged a book
in the catalog, use these tags in the catalog. If we provided a
bibliographic reference keeping software utility that users actually
wanted to use (a big if; users may not need this from us; we may not be
capable of providing one good enough)---I am confident it would lead to
this. Are there other ways to encourage users to tag? Maybe. But it's
always about providing some individual payoff to tagging, some reason to
tag that is in fact about 'social'.
Contrary to popular belief, I dont' believe that users tag their
"movies" because they are interested in meeting other people interested
in "movies". They tag them because they are trying to keep track of them
themselves, and that's what they call them!
But regardless of all this stuff, if we have a bunch of services that
allow tagging of the same "things" (books), then it is certainly an
interesting idea and worth pursuing to try and aggregate/share tag data
amongst all these services. For sure. But even if our library catalog
ends up full of imported tags (from librarything, perhaps), I still
don't think many users will tag unless there is some personal utility to
doing so. People don't tag just to help others out, mainly.
Jonathan
>
> Then I look at something like WorldCat, and it recently allowing users
> to add reviews. I don't feel motivated to add reviews because my single
> review would be just a drop in the bucket, since most of the items don't
> have a review, and many of the items in the database are of little
> interest and will NEVER have a review. There isn't a critical mass of
> reviews to stimulate me to take part. The database is just too big and
> my effort would be lost. This may be how users feel about tagging in
> Amazon.
>
> I guess this is like the "empty restaurant" syndrome. No one wants to be
> the only one in a restaurant, and we're all willing to stand in line at
> the over-crowded one down the street, even if we could be guaranteed
> that the food is the same. We are social animals, and the fascinating
> thing about social networking is that it is really social.
>
> kc
>
> Tim Spalding wrote:
>> I just wrote up the first really big examination of book tagging on
>> the two largest book-taggers, Amazon and LibraryThing. I think it
>> might be interesting here.
>>
>> http://www.librarything.com/thingology/2007/02/when-tags-works-and-when-they-dont.php
>>
>>
>>
>> I conclude that LibraryThing has ten times as many book tags as
>> Amazon, and speculate about what this means in light of a much wider
>> disparity in traffic. I originally wrote it to include PennTags, but
>> it got out of hand and it didn't seem fair to compare them. But my
>> comments about how "numbers matter" in tagging is, I think, pretty
>> important for the future of efforts like PennTags, Blyberg's SOPAC,
>> the Swedish library and others. Tags only work in big numbers. (That's
>> why LibraryThing will be coming out with a "tag consortium" in the
>> near future.)
>>
>> Tim
>>
>>
>
> --
> -----------------------------------
> Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
> kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
> ph.: 510-540-7596
> fx.: 510-848-3913
> mo.: 510-435-8234
> ------------------------------------
>
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Sr. Programmer/Analyst
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
Received on Wed Feb 21 2007 - 15:21:22 EST