I attended a panel discussion at Web 2.0 on tagging with Caterina Fake (Flickr/Yahoo!), and Jeff Veen (Adaptive Path), Joshua Schachter (del.icio.us), and Tantek Çelik (Technorati). A few things jumped out at me:
- Jeff Veen gave a great example at how tagging is actually easier than folder management. Folders are difficult to keep up with and can’t support multi-facited browsing. Taggin is faster to do and can be associated easily with others’ tags. For example a bunch of Disneyland photos can be tagged “Disneyland” and people get it even if they couldn’t define what a tag actually is.
- Caterina had a great answer to Esther Dyson and Jeff Jarvis‘s questions on what a hassle it is to agree upon certain tags (e.g. Web2 vs. Web2.0 vs. Web20). She demoed how Flickr uses clustering technology to find similar tags. Presumably this will be built into “My Web 2.0” which she is now working on. I think what is most apparent is that tags are such a simple solution (vs. other more complex meta-data solutions).
- Also discussed is how meta tags will succeed where meta keywords did not for a couple reasons. They are visible (which helps prevent fraud and mistakes), they are created by both the author/creator and the reader/customer.
I think what will be most telling over the next year is how the masses take to tags. Now that all the major internet companies are tinkering with these ideas (e.g. eBay’s Reviews & Guides, Yahoo’s My Web 2.0 & Flickr, Google’s GMail) we’ll see if people do actually get it. Will it get built into the next version of Windows? What will the penetration of usage be?