Multi-User Tagging

Tagging has it's problems and so we're going to present one idea that could make tagging more relevant and useful: Multi-User Tagging

Problems with single user classification (tagging)

• The person who posted the item being tagged may not have classified it (tagged it) correctly
• The person who posted the item may have personal tags that mean nothing to the rest of the world, for instance, they tag their photos with the name of someone in it like "John", or a bookmark/favorite tagged as "zebra", which you can see by clicking on those links, has so many different meanings.
• The person who posted the item may have tagged it for some other motive than just classification... aka spam.

Some recommendations:

1. Tags per user per item. Sites that support tags should try to support the notion of tags per user per item, so each user can have their own set of tags for a particular item. Delicious does this well, and so does flickr.
   
2. Ranking tags. Allow users to + or - a tag on an item to increase the rank of that tag on the item. delicious does this in a round about way because when I save a url and tag it, it can count up all the other people that have saved the same url and count the tags on them. flickr and most others do not support this because although I can add tags to items I do not own, I can't add the same tag that is already on the picture so it will only count as a single tag. They should have a way for me to increase the rank of a tag.
   

This will lead to better classification. When many users classify something, there is a much better chance that it will be more relevant. If 100 people tag an item as "zebra" for example, then there is a good chance that the item really is a zebra. Compare that to 1 person classifying the item as "zebra" (could be a codename); which is likely to be more relevant? One man's John, is another man's toilet.

By allowing all users to apply tags to each item, the types of problems listed above should dissipate. Especially the tag ranking, because if a particular tag gets downgraded on an item by many people, then that item will show up very low on a search for that tag.

Further reading:
Danny Sullivan wrote an interesting article about why tagging on Yahoo's My Web kinda sucks.

Tags: rel8r | tagging | spam | ranking | delicious | myweb