OK fine, I’ll jump on the tagging train, if I have to. I don’t want to, just let me make that clear right now. It’s just one more thing for me to add to my world(s). I fought del.icio.us and flickr, and blog comment boxes that ask for tags – forget it! I’ve steadfastly refused to join the game of tag. (I hated playing tag as a kid, could that be part of the problem??)
I found myself spurling just to share my bookmarks with TW and of course there are those darn tags to include. Pst, I don’t always tag what I spurl! I know, that’s bad. I finally gave in to flickr but ummm, I don’t always tag my pictures. Bad again, I’m sorryyyyyy.
But now, it appears I’m going to have to really start getting use to tagging because the boss has jumped in and wants to play tag the board post. Sigh. It’s a damn conspiracy or something to force me to tag when I don’t want to!
Which brings me to what I’m bugged about right this moment – if I don’t want to tag, because it’s just one more thing and I’m someone who actually understands why tagging is cool (or could be) and someone who has spent a zillion years working in online community then how in the hell am I going to convince normal members to tag their posts or their blogs or whatever publshing/communications tools we give them? These are just regular people who rant and rave about threaded vs linear and how many “re:” should appear within in a discussion and whether they have avatars to play with. How do you convince the normal Jane and Joe that tagging is good for them and will help THEM in the long run?
iVillage had those dumb keyword fields on message boards years and years ago and if they worked, I don’t really know how they worked. And if they did work, I don’t know anyone who used them – even the community leaders and moderators didn’t. Granted there wasn’t a “folksonomies” buzz in the air and there wasn’t a huge game of tag going on throughout the internet world, but still… I wonder if people are all that different today than they were five years ago.