#13 Tagging

Some advantages I see to tagging: informal usage, real-world language, customization. Disadvantages are, of course, no controlled vocabulary and really inefficient and misleading searching. I never thought about "spam tag". I had never heard that term. Usually assigning more subject heading to books is a good thing. You broaden the chance the book will be found in your catalog system. I never considered that users would apply an excessive number (or unrelated tags) just to attract more people to an item or image. I mean I would never assign a "chocolate" subject to a book on turnips just because I think more people would look at it that way. It is completely misleading. That's part of the open source disadvantage of the web. Without some kind of authority control you end up with wasted time and frustration on the part of the searcher. Let's say you are talking about carving. Well, wood carving, or how to carve a turkey or...Words can have so many different meanings that tagging, again, seems to be rather haphazard.