Crapsonomy
Merlin has a new definition of free tagging, Crapsonomy and I kind of love it.
Bloggar.se: folksonomier, taggar, etiketter, crapsonomy, folksonomy
Related posts
4 Comments
- Pelle replied:
Yeah - that’s really crappy - but it’s a crappiness that is force upon bloggers and which perhaps isn’t that crappy as it might look at first.
The sites who are using tags to organize stuff aren’t that good at merging the different tags that people use for the same content into one unified stream and therefor if you want to exist in all streams you have to tag your post with all the streams’ tags.
Although - when you’ve tagged your post with all those tags you’re also giving sites additional data to connect different tags - but on the other hand you’ve made it harder for them to choose a winner.
It’s a challenge for the web when it’s moving towards being more and more semantic but hopefully a solution can be found - perhaps web services that acts like thesaurus for tags or something similar…
August 8th, 2008 at 9:22 pm. Permalink.
- Jonas replied:
Well put, Pelle. Completely agree, but the true problem originates from the freedom of tagging. In most cases putting 25 tags on a post should be forbidden. Maybe posts should be limited to 5 tags or something similair, otherwise the crapsonomy will win over the folksonomy.
There should be a more 37signalish attitude towards tagging. Less is actually more.
(Comments like yours make me truly understand Fred Wilson and others when they want a tool that put an effort to put an individual value to both the original post and the comments that follow.
Often the original post is just the fire starter and the true value is in the comments although that is hidden for most readers of the content source. Hopefully companies like Disqus can help solve this.
Sorry for trailing off from the original topic
)August 8th, 2008 at 10:15 pm. Permalink.
- Pelle replied:
Less is certainly more - but it should always be the cause and not the symptom that is to be fixed because the symptom in itself is not an actual problem but rather an expression of the real problem causing it. By fixing the symptom one only silences a warning signal and makes it harder to track down the real problem.
By adding multiple tags the bloggers are in a way doing the job of connecting tags that the web services should be performing and that’s why they’re doing it - they gain visitors by doing it.
If the web services performed that job instead all of the bloggers’ own extra tags would be redundant and they would most probably remove them because they would then only be of distraction.
Btw - I agree with you on the comments. I myself like Jeremy Keith’s attitude towards them, but I haven’t been able to live up to it yet…
August 8th, 2008 at 10:51 pm. Permalink.
- Jonas replied:
I belive sometimes the symptom can actually be worse than the cause. Tagging is great but the behaviour of tagging is not ok and that’s not only to blame on the tech side.
Many people, like in the image of this post, don’t add any value with most of the tags. Writing “Kathy Hilton” and “Huffington post” should be enough and it’s enough for most web services. But then to add “Kathy Hilton Huffington” “Kathy Hilton Huffington post” “Huffington post kathy” is just spam tagging hoping that it on some level will attract more traffic.
If the web service is good then tags shouldn’t need to be entered more than once and the pattern of those 3,4 or 5 tags should be enough in order to help the web service to provide searchers with proper results.
August 9th, 2008 at 10:20 am. Permalink.
Leave a Reply
TrackBack Identifier URI
