Tagging things or thinging tags?
January 8th, 2008 by David Weinberger
Vista’s photo manager has a built in tagging facility. Yay!
But I couldn’t figure out how to apply tags to photos until I checked the built-in help. The photo manager shows you your photos on the right and your list of tags on the left. I kept trying to drag tags onto the photos. Nope. You have to drag your photos onto your tags.
This strikes me as weird. It’s less convenient because when you drag a photo, you are dragging a translucent image of the photo, which makes it a little hard to see the list over which you’re dragging it. It’s do-able, but it’s not as easy as dragging a little bit of text onto a great big image.
So, why would Microsoft design it this way? All I can figure is that the designers were thinking that tags are like categories: Bins into which things go. For most of us, however, tags are labels that get attached to things. It works either way, but the “containment” metaphor seems inappropriate for tags… [Tags: tagging vista categories taxonomy folksonomy everything_is_miscellaneous ]
It’s because you can drag the tags themselves into a hierarchy of tags… Try it.
Geoff:
But that’s his point: a hierarchy of tags embodies this “containment” metaphor rather than the flat approach traditionally implied by *tags*. There’s certainly value in a hierarchy, especially if it’s just a pseudo-hierarchy as hinted at by the tree-of-tags metaphore — but, at least to me, calling this structure “tagging” seems like a perversion of the concept. Perhaps, as Weinberger notes, “categories” would be more descriptive.