Tagging isn’t the final destination for social search. Tagging is a step along the way. The beauty of tagging is that it reflects real-life. I turn to my friends and family for a lot of my information needs and with social search I can search or browse within my community of friends whenever I want to, rather than pushing emails to them. This could be through reviews they’ve written, web pages they’ve saved, photos they’ve taken, online communities they are part of, etc.
Search isn’t there yet, but it will be.
Obviously tagging in its current form has three big problems:
1. not everyone does it.
2. it’s susceptible to spam.
3. it’s not a controlled vocabulary so two people might use different tags for the same thing, such as -ToyotaPrius- vs. -Prius-.
My responses:
1. OK, I don’t need everyone to do it. But if some of my friends do it just a little bit, then algorithms can learn from their preferences and expand it to a larger set of data. It’s the search cycle. Start with human created data and make machines learn from that.
2. Yes it is. That’s why people and software need to constantly police it. Also, if I’m mainly concerned with my community’s interests, then I’ll trust them not to spam me.
3. No cataloging system is perfect, but a combination of tagging/folksonomies and catalogers/taxonomists/ontologists, can allow for individualism within a semi-controlled environment. See my post about tagsologies.