Joe Lamantia recently published a two–part essay on tag clouds. He’s managed to create a nice primer on tagging from an IA’s point of view. His tone of voice is a bit academic, which may turn you off, but his predictions of future directions for tagging and tag clouds are spot on quite interesting.
A while ago I tried to come to grips with the tagging phenomenon in a series of posts on open.info.nl (in Dutch). The last one was on facetted tagging. Lamantia briefly mentions this as a new direction, but doesn’t really describe how he imagines this would work.
I’m in the planning phase of a facetted tagging demo, and still not sure how to approach it: should content editors specify the facets within which content users can tag, or should the facets be tags as well. In other words – how far should we go in relinquishing control over metadata?
How do you know? Are you some kind of psychic? If so, can you give me some more future directions? ;-) Should I turn left or right?
Sigh — I’m sorry Edgar, my English is, as always, quite spotty.
Oh, and be sure to turn left. Just not now. ;-)