Defining tagging

1. The parts of tagging
2. Tag browsers
3. The realms of tagging

One of the reasons that tagging can be difficult to get into is because few tagging systems are alike. Although there are similarities, tagging is not only still evolving as a way of organizing but there are also several different ways to think about tags.

The most striking difference between different tagging programs is generally the tag browser. The act of tagging is fairly standardized (auto-complete, drag and drop, etc.), but browsing is much more heterogeneous. Most browsers fall into one of three types: tag clouds, tag trees, or tag recipes.

Tag cloud

The tag cloud is the most common tag browser online and is also well represented offline. A tag cloud is a list of all available tags, often with some indication through color or size about which tags are used more (the tags are weighted).

A tag cloud is flat; in other words, the tags have no direct relationship to one another. If I’m using a tag cloud to sort RTF documents, the tagging software may know that “writing” and “short story” occur on a lot of documents together, but it doesn’t know that a short story is a type of writing.

Some tag clouds allow you to browse for single tags, while others are cumulative. A cumulative tag cloud lets you select multiple tags and find only items that have all of them. Tagamac’s tag cloud is not cumulative, but it is a good example of a weighted cloud (using size rather than color).

Tag tree

Tag trees are less common online (I’m not sure if I’ve ever come across one, actually), and more common in software that manages things like photos. Tag trees are hierarchical. Tags can contain other tags, and they move from general to specific. For instance, I might have a “country” tag and inside of it I have tags like “france”, “britain”, and “swaziland”. Then inside of those tags I might have cities: “paris”, “london”, and “mbabane”. The tags have a parent-child relationship: “britain” is the parent of “london” and “mbabane” is the child of “swaziland”.

Tag trees are not good for cumulative browsing. Instead they allow you to drill down to a specific tag, which limits your results to items that have that tag. The advantage of using a tag tree rather than a traditional hierarchical system (such as folders) is that items can easily have multiple tags.

Some tag trees allow you to see the contents of children tags when browsing a parent tag. Others subscribe to traditional folder styles and only show you the items that have that specific tag. Both ways have their pros and cons.

Tag recipe

Tag recipes are usually found in desktop software. Browsing a tag recipe is like finding a recipe by selecting the ingredients one by one. First, you select a single tag. You are then shown a list of all other tags that occur on items with the first tag. You continue to select tags until you have a recipe of tags and a very small number of applicable items. Tag recipes can easily be paired with either tag trees or tag clouds.

Tag recipes are flat because they only show which tags occur together with no indication of parent-child relationships, and they are always cumulative. The nice thing about a tag recipe as compared to a cumulative tag cloud is that the recipe only lets you pick tags that occur together.

As far as I know, I’m the only person who uses the term “tag recipe.” There may be a more technical term for them, but I wanted something that suggested its functionality. Of course, the metaphor is a bit backwards unless you do a lot of searching for recipes using ingredients, but such is life. I’d love to hear if you know of another name for this kind of tag browser. The only other one I’ve heard bandied about is “tag browser”, which applies to all three to my mind.

Why do we care?

As I’ve said before, there’s no single right way to tag. How to tag relies heavily on which tag browser you are using and what makes sense to you. The tag browser is usually what makes or breaks a piece of tagging software, so knowing what your different options are can help you find the perfect software for you. If you know that using tag clouds makes you irritable (or joyful, or melancholy, or whatever else), then you can save yourself a lot of time when you are browsing through software.

Defining tagging

1. The parts of tagging
2. Tag browsers
3. The realms of tagging

I like to think that tagging is straightforward. It may seem like a strange way to organize and find information at first, but once you get used to it the whole process is not that complicated.

However, even when a subject is not particularly complicated, it can still be difficult to talk about. I have found in my journey through life (and academia, which are not one and the same no matter what they tell you) that one of the most important parts of any discussion of a topic is solid definitions. As a result, I am going to try to break down using tags into simple definitions over the course of several articles. This article is the first, and defines the three actions that you will perform when working with tags:

Tagging: the act of attaching a tag to something. This is probably what you think of first when you think of tags. Tagging also refers to maintenance of your pool of tags; removing tags, renaming tags, organizing tags, adding new tags, etc. Tagging is the creative portion of using tags, because you have to think up which tags to use (also when you are thinking of using the SLS system or not).

Searching: the act of using tags to find specific targeted items. You could also call this “filtering” if you wanted. Searching is what you do when you know what you are trying to find, and you use tags to locate it. An example would be if I wanted to find that picture of my friend Suzy that I took in New York, and searched for items with the tags “suzy” and “new york”. Searching also covers using saved searches to sort and locate items.

Browsing: the act of using tags to find related items. Unlike searching, browsing doesn’t target any specific item or subset of items. Instead, when you browse tags you are usually looking for related items. For example, I might browse my “suzy” tag to see all pictures of Suzy. Closer to home, the tags attached to each article on Tagamac are best suited for browsing because while they do not supplement the search system (and are thus not very useful for locating specific articles), they do make it easy to find articles that are related.