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Darren Barefoot rants against tags, perhaps a bit hyperbolic (but a welcome tonic these days). There’s a gem in the first comment though:

…tags only work well for individuals who know what they will tag something with. That is, if I need to find a URL or know I linked to something that’s related to something else, then I search for a tag that, based on what I know about myself, I would use to categorize it. Aggregating individuals’ tags to determine what the category something belongs to so far hasn’t delivered on its promise, which is a “wisdom of crowds” of categorization.

Tagging may seem more social than it really is. Food for thought.

One Response to “Tags more useful for individuals than groups?”

  1. Informusings says:

    Metacrap and Problems with Communal Keywords

    Jon Stahl pointed me to a blog entry from Darren Barefoot on how Technorati tags don’t work so well. This provides a very concrete example of the ideas presented in Cory Doctorow’s Metacrap Thesis, which essentially offers a broader view of the same …

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