Blogoforum - Digg Tagging?

The Mu Life author asked me to comment on his "The Role of Tags in Social Bookmarking" article. In the article, Muhammad talks about Digg requiring users to put stories into predefined categories, and suggests that tag-based categorization would work better.

What can I say? As a big fan of tagging*, I completely agree! Here are few examples for you to though about.

Let's suppose I have an article about say the design of new Mac OS. Or the article is about next-generation iPod design. What's the correct place of a story of such kind? There are at least three candidate categories, all are under "Technology": "Apple", "Design", and "Industry News", also probably "Software" for new OS story, and "Hardware" for a new gadget.

I feel a bit lost. Why I am required to chose one category when my story is ok for three? Am I supposed to start a research on what the correct category is? When I'll make my choice, how about users who browse other categories and may miss my story?

That's what the tagging is for. To get around these, let the user to tag the story as "apple", "technology", "design", "news", "software" or whatever. Give the user freedom to decide what categories to have and what information structure should be.

I always missed tagging in Digg. Browsing its categories I saw stories on wide areas of subjects. While being interested in some particular topic (say "tagging") I didn't knew what category to look in. Should I browse all Industry News, Programming, and Software?

del.icio.us, from the other side, has become my first starting point for a research on a particular topic. If I'm looking for must-have Firefox plugins I go to http://del.icio.us/popular/firefox , looking for startup partners advices I go to http://del.icio.us/popular/equity , and looking for digg-enabling a web site I go to - yes, http://del.icio.us/popular/digg .

A few words to people who point on some limitations of tag-based categorization systems. Here on Blogoforum, I experiment with tags a lot. And hey, the system is a rich field for experiments. You can do a lot of tricks with tags. It was believed tag-based navigation is flat - I managed to introduce hierarchical tag browsing. Even more - using tags, the system can create a hierarchical categories-like information tree (see Forum Groups are in development for initial steps in this direction). Tag-based classification is very promising and an area open for innovations.


* As you can see, I'm so big fan of tagging that I've developed a whole new tag-based website (called Blogoforum).