Everything is Miscellaneous describes how the internet is redefining categorization. When creating a scrapbook, you are the one that decides how to order the pictures. You may decide to categorize the pictures in chronological order, by certain events, who are in the photographs, etc. The scrapbook will used from time to time on occasion and after a few years, you may rarely look through them. However, now you can place these photographs online and tag them in certain ways in which other people can view them. Other people can continue to tag the photograph and people can view your picture all over the world.
By tagging photos, videos, and articles we can organize our way through the information age any way we see fit. However, a problem mentioned in the book is figuring out how people tag these pieces of information. This is important in order for information to be found easily on the internet. So I am doing a little experiment. Below is a picture I captured from Flickr. This random photo had 14 tags attached to it, can you guess what they are? How would YOU tag this picture?
How would you tag this picture?
smock's blog 
Tags: color,colored,drop,drops,water,macro, splash
Great tags! Water, splash, and macro-life are all tags for this picture. There are still 11 more tags that have not been identified yet.
I’d tag it: neon, paint, multi-color, frozen in time, freeze frame, ker-plunk!
Good tags as well! (Especially ker-plunk!)
Paint is another correctly identified tag for this picture.
Freeze frame, splash, color, water, paint…
… but you make an excellent point about one of the main weaknesses of tagging. Have you noticed how many sites try to overcome this problem? They suggest tags, so users pick the same tags and make the information more findable. Is that solution good enough?
It certainly helps to have suggested tags for pictures. It also helps if multiple people were able to tag photos what they wanted. This way the picture is not tagged based on how one person sees it but collectively as a group.
For example, those that commented on this photo have tagged the picture with ‘color’, which is not a current tag for this photo. If I was searching for this photo on Flikr, that would be one of the first tags I would look for.
ps: check our Gravatar dot com to add your avatar to these comments. Makes it feel more personal, more real, more you. From best to worst: photo of you, photo of “whatever”, generic/default avatar.
Just saying 🙂
I have an avatar picture, but I am unsure why it is not showing up. Currently trying to figure it out.
Thanks for the advise! It is always welcome 🙂
I love the use of the tagging experiment at the end of your post. The problem I would run into is that I’m a little more abstract in my thinking, therefore my tags are a stretch too. It looks like a glass sculpture, so “glass” and “sculpture” would be two I would use in addition to paint, color, etc. I always play this game with tagging that asks the following:
What is the most random, yet most understandable tag that a person would search using?
Here are the actual tags for this picture:
high
speed
paint
splash
water
sound
figures
cognisys
stopshot
trigger
system
key
C
Macro-Life
See for yourself! Water Sound Figure
High and speed are separate tags? Imagine if you search Flickr for just “high”, what kind of results are you going to get? What does C have to do with anything? If you search for just “C” won’t you get everything that starts with “C”?
This example absolutely illustrates the issues with a tagging system. Though, I guess knowing the background of the picture and how it was taken would help understand the tags that were given.
@scottsc09 tags on Flickr and Delicious (and many other places) are one word long. People sometimes uses underscores, dashes, dots or casing to get around that: highSpeed, high_speed, high.speed, etc.
Although you do end up with some crappy tags, using individual words is much handier for tag intersection searches: high+speed, high+ROI, etc.
On Flick tag intersection is done with comma’s in the URL … very weird:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/high,speed