From Social Patterns

Not sure how you'd like to manage suggestions/comments/questions, so I opted for the discussion tab.

A few questions / comments on tagging

- What are the best options for tag input/creation e.g., we saw at Yahoo! Podcasts that users were using the tag entry interface as a search query, causing a massively polluted tag cloud). e.g., flickr's interface seems to do a good job of this, whereas other places just give you a form field and submit button.

- Controlled vocabulary versus open tagging - a little more texture on this would be a great thing. e.g., I suspect that the user's of my site will not be very good taggers to start. I'm thinking of starting them with a totally controlled vocab, then allowing them to "suggest" new tags. If a certain number of other folks suggest the same tag, then it becomes real.

- Measuring and incenting the tag influencers. e.g., I have a very large amount of information that was never given human readable metainfo. I now need to introduce a tagging mechanism and incent them to provide good tags. I have "monopoly money" I can give them, which is one way to do it, but I'm sure there are others.

- Fixing an existing broken tag system. e.g., I inherited a legacy user profile in which users can tag themselves. The input interface is bad, so most folks use it as a secondary "about me" section by typing in long complete sentences which are translated into almost useless tags. What are some options for cleaning this stuff up after the fact? Kill it and start over with a better input and apology? Delete unhelpful stop word tags silently?

discussion is good

We just have to remember to subscribe to the recent changes page!

Erik, gonna read your thoughts now...

--erin here:-- good questions Erik.

Options for tag input/creation - Placement of the tag entry mechanism is critical to keeping it from being confused with a search mechanism. Placing the ability to tag near the object being tagged helps. Keeping the ability to tag out of the header and other locations often traditionally used for Search interfaces will help as well. Using inline/ajax call to action that then evolves into a field to add a tag will also be effective.

Controlled vocabulary versus tagging - I believe you should have both a controlled vocabulary and then allow user tagging on top of that. Let the CV be the master organizer and then allow tags for pivoting and filtering.

Incenting tag influencers - you may want to pre-seed the content with tags from your staff or other internal people so that end users have a clue about what the context may be.

Fixing broken tag system - The balance between starting over or writing code to clean up what exists needs to be assessed based on how much content already exists in the system. If it is low, consider just starting over and moving the existing content into a free-text field or something like that.