Tagging behind-the-firewall. Questions.

Over at Taxocop (a wiki dedicated to taxonomy, social networks, knowledge managment, and information architecture), there is a discussion going about the use of “social tagging” — by which they mean what we all call tagging, meaning user-generated, unmediated tags linked to information. When you dig into the comments, you see that the heavy hand of centralized control is unwilling to go with the flow, and gain the benefits of bottom-up organization:

Christine Connors really added fire to the discussion with her description of how her company, Raytheon, successfully uses social tagging in a hybrid approach. At Raytheon, people submit website suggestions (URLs) along with recommended tags/keyword which are subsequently verified and approved by librarians.
“We only rarely disapprove of a user-submitted term; overly general, vague or completely off-base terms are those that get deleted. We occasionally call to clarify a submission.”

What’s wrong with overly general terms? Yikes.

Later on, Seth Early shows the dark side of the conversation, and how library science types just don’t get it:

I would imagine that this is effective because it is specific to an audience. (This is an area I have suggested in the past that social tagging will evolve to - searching specifically for tags that your peer group - or a specific audience - has selected as opposed to those selected by the hoi polloi.) The challenge will be to gather metadata about the group of taggers that will allow filtering of results. This is where social network analysis and organizational network analysis will come into play.

Oh yes, don’t use tags created by the hoi polloi, use only expert-approved tags.

This thinking is completely countered by the notions of collective intelligence. If you just step out of the way, and let users generate the tags, order emerges. You don’t need librarians or management deciding whose associations are vague, or determining whether your petigree shoudl allow your tags to exist or not.

[pointer by David Weinberger, who is much too soft on this people.