17 January 2006
Public and Private
There are going to be so many permutations and approaches to making sense of private tags and public tags (where “private” = done for oneself, but still accessible by the public). This will all intersect with social networking software, analyzing tag usage among users who know one another and users who are share interests and demographics. We need, imo, room for both public and private. That’s why I’d like social tagging sites to allow me to designate a tag as private.
David Weinberger commenting in his What is a folksonomy anyway?
Rob Fay said,
Jan 17 #
Good idea! I’ve struggled with the purpose of tagging because some people do it selfishly and others do it for the benefit of others. I’ve documented my thinking of folksonomies here: http://robfay.com/2005/07/28/the-anti-google/
Let me ask you this…why would you want private tags that you would not share with others?
My answer would be that I sometimes create tags that are used for blogging purposes. That is, I might create a “forblog” tag which is the label picked up when I send an rss feed to my blog. This label, however, benefits noone except myself. In fact, it muddies the waters a bit.
Therefore, I think separating the tags has some benefit.
Saurier said,
Jan 18 #
Yep. Another use-case could be to hide commonly used words if you use them in an uncommon way. If e.g. lifehacker.com links to a webbased feedreader folks tend to apply the tags lifehacks and gtd automagically – which is perfectly fine, of course, because a feedreader might solve a specific problem they’ve got or because they want to remember that they’ve spotted the link at the lifehacker site or whatever, but aggregated the tags lifehacks and gtd become pretty emtpy signifier. The ability to mark specific tags private also could help decluttering the tag-streams a little bit.