Jeff Bridgforth :: Webcraftsman

Is Tagging Right for Your Site?

July 31, 2006

Random

(This post is also fea­tured on eMi­nistry Notes.)
Last week, I par­tic­i­pated in a vir­tual sem­i­nar done by Josh Porter of UIE. The topic was “is tag­ging right for your site?” Tag­ging is part of Web 2.0. Tags are like key­words but the big dif­fer­ence is that they are deter­mined by the user not the infor­ma­tion archi­tects of the web­site. And unlike tra­di­tional cat­e­gories on some sites, you can have mul­ti­ple tags on an object like a photo, con­tent or peo­ple. If you would like some more infor­ma­tion on tag­ging, I would sug­gest some of these arti­cles writ­ten by Joshua Porter:

• Folk­sonomies: A User-Driven Approach to Orga­niz­ing Content
• Tag­ging Cat­e­gory on Josh’s blog, Bokardo.com

You can see exam­ples of tag­ging on Flickr, del.icio.us, and Google video. One Cam­pus Cru­sade min­istry site that is using tag­ging is StorySpot.com.

One of the key ben­e­fits of tag­ging is that the users are deter­min­ing the words so tags speak the user’s lan­guage. This has been a big chal­lenge for any­one try­ing to do infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture on a web­site, to get the cat­e­gories in lan­guage that is mean­ing­ful to the user. As we know, what is mean­ing­ful to us as web devel­op­ers is not always (usu­ally) mean­ing­ful or con­nect with those try­ing to use our sites.

The best insight I got from the sem­i­nar is that the most com­mon use and the one that is the great­est ben­e­fit to users right now is tag­ging for per­sonal retrieval and orga­ni­za­tion. Users are tag­ging things that they want to be able to find later. Joshua said that as we think about imple­ment­ing tag­ging, it works best when we are seek­ing the per­sonal ben­e­fit of the user.

Given the fact that one of the great­est ben­e­fits that users are get­ting from tag­ging right now is per­sonal retrieval, I think that there are sev­eral min­istry sites that would be greatly enhanced be tag­ging. I would love to imple­ment it on one of my min­istry sites, GodSquad.com. Most of the site is a repos­i­tory for some of the best resources and tools that the US Cam­pus min­istry has devel­oped. I can think of at least two emails this past year that asked for eas­ier ways of remem­ber­ing con­tent. I see tag­ging as a pos­si­ble solu­tion to many things I have been think­ing about in regards to improv­ing the site.

As I con­tinue to process the mate­r­ial from the sem­i­nar, I hope to share some more insights.