Categories or Tags?

From the beginning, I figured that using a limited number of categories was the best way to organize the listings on CampusActivism.org.

However recently, there has been a growing movement towards tagging as an alternative method of categorization.

Flickr lets users upload images and give them any tag they want. Livejournal lets you give any name you want for your interests. del.icio.us lets you choose any tag you want for your website bookmarks (which are shared with other users). Similarly, Google, the best search engine, doesn't use categories (whereas its poorer counterpart, Yahoo, does).

Greenpeace's Melt software is going with tags.

Here is an interesting essay advocating tags

Personally, I tried out a couple tags on del.ico.us and found that it didn't compete with Google. Perhaps this is mostly a matter of size - as Google simply has many times more material. Or it could be that user-ranking isn't as good as Google. Eg. the google search algorithm is "King" (which based on my experience using Google, I wouldn't put it past them to creat a better algorithm than the opinions of a bunch of techies using the latest cool website).

Flickr - tagging seems to be strictly limited by the fact that users like to use one word tags which don't mean much. I think flickr could fix this by letting you search for things that have two tags (eg. "red" and "coat"). Otherwise you can find yourself wading through as many as 100,000 pictures of a very common thing. By contrast, using three or four keywords in a search on google works much better (note: pro searchers almost never use one word, and two-word searches are pretty rare, unless you put them in quotes for an exact string match).

Maybe I'm too much of a professional search engine user?

In the social sciences, there is an analogus debate - when you create a survey should you use open-ended questions or provide a number of fixed options?

My methods professor, argued for fixed options, because you will end up grouping all the open-ended answers into categories - so it is better for you to let people choose which category they want to be put in, instead of doing it yourself (and providing them with an illusion of freedom).

However, in this case, the argument of the pro-tags people is that you don't need to categorize. It's ok if people create their own categories and nobody finds their listings because they chose irregular categories. I'm not sure about this idea. It could empower people to be eccentrics, to hold true to their own values, but it could also just end up marginalizing people and disempowering them by hiding their listings.

If you start to use popularity as a base for whether or not a listing with a tag appears, then people with unpopular tags will not show up. This would operate in similar fashion, though not as bad, as the way in which certain websites receive a disproportionate amount of website traffic, whereas poorly linked sites receive much less.

Both tags and categories share the problem that users will have a hard time figuring out what tags/categories to give to their listings.

On campusactivism.org, i'm regularly adding a category or issue to a resource, group, or event - because some people don't connect their listings to anything, or don't understand the system I have. Particularly the system i have for sorting resources into categories isn't the most self-explanatory (of course the idea of uploading resources, sharing materials online is not obvious either).

One possible solution is to mix having tags with categories. So listings would be connected to both. Another possible solution is to have people who recommend a tag/category, or an algorithm that does it for you. If you give up a degree of personal ownership over listings (this would particularly make sense for non-person things like groups, resources, and events) then letting other people tag them could work?

To conclude, I like the idea of tagging and non-hierarchical navigation, but in practice I'm skeptical as to whether it will work for any entity that does not have a really good search system and a lot of data to search.