Product Description

Tagging is fast becoming one of the primary ways people organize and manage digital information. Tagging complements traditional organizational tools like folders and search on users desktops as well as on the web. These developments mean that tagging has broad implications for information management, information architecture and interface design. And its reach extends beyond these technical domains to our culture at large. We can imagine, for example, the scrapbookers of the future curating their digital photos, emails, ticket stubs and other mementos with tags. This book explains the value of tagging, explores why people tag, how tagging works and when it can be used to improve the user experience. It exposes tagging's superficial simplicity to reveal interesting issues related to usability, information architecture, online community and collective intelligence.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #100511 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 216 pages

From the Back Cover
Tagging is fast becoming one of the primary ways people organize and manage digital information. Tagging complements traditional organizational tools like folders and search on users desktops as well as on the web. These developments mean that tagging has broad implications for information management, information architecture and interface design. And its reach extends beyond these technical domains to our culture at large. We can imagine, for example, the scrapbookers of the future curating their digital photos, emails, ticket stubs and other mementos with tags. This book explains the value of tagging, explores why people tag, how tagging works and when it can be used to improve the user experience. It exposes tagging's superficial simplicity to reveal interesting issues related to usability, information architecture, online community and collective intelligence.

About the Author
Gene Smith is a consultant specializing in information architecture strategy, social classification like tagging and folksonomies, emergent information architecture and interaction design. As a principal at nForm User Experience, he's advised clients like Comcast, Ancestry.com and the Canadian Patient Safety Institute. Through conference presentations and online publication Gene has helped define social information architecture, an emerging field that looks at how user interactions create structure in information spaces.

Customer Reviews

Tagging: from philosophy to technology
I really enjoyed reading this book, in many ways it seemed to be written for me. It starts explaining what tags are, goes through explaining what the value of tags are and how they link to taxonomies and folksonomies, it concludes with discussions of design and implementation. All this is supplemented by some good case studies. While all these things are of interest to me, I do wonder how wide the potential readership is of people who want to read a combination of socio-technical issues, which includes several pages of PHP/MySQL code.

I've just decided to edit the review, so I could add the information: that one of the systems mentioned is Amazon's tagging system and I have just used that to tag this review.

good read
the book is an easy read with good and numerous examples
it provides a high level (and not low-level or implementation level) view
nonetheless it is enjoyable

Excellent introduction
Tagging is an excellent all-round introduction to tagging and user-generated information management. It covered everything I needed to quickly pick up the topic and provided me with some useful pointers where to go next.