Comments on: Talking with Cathy Marshall about tags, digital archiving, and lifestreams http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/08/03/talking-with-cathy-marshall-about-tags-digital-archiving-and-lifestreams/ Strategies for Internet citizens Fri, 17 Feb 2012 16:47:16 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Greg martin http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/08/03/talking-with-cathy-marshall-about-tags-digital-archiving-and-lifestreams/#comment-129957 Wed, 26 Aug 2009 16:56:24 +0000 http://blog.jonudell.net/?p=1825#comment-129957 I loved this conversation. (Your interview style is awesome) Especially when you discussed movie/film/cinema. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film or cinema! but I love the fact that others might see life that way.

But, in your tags example, I did find that people don’t like apostrophes (or maybe they’re not supported in Flickr tags. but searching for ‘Milan bull balls’ does work.

http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=milan+bull+balls&m=tags

]]> By: links for 2009-08-15 « Talkabout http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/08/03/talking-with-cathy-marshall-about-tags-digital-archiving-and-lifestreams/#comment-129892 Sun, 16 Aug 2009 03:31:47 +0000 http://blog.jonudell.net/?p=1825#comment-129892 [...] Tags not that useful for information retrieval – Jon Udell interviews Cathy Marshall of Micros… <blockquote> <p> she collected a bunch of Flickr photos of people <a href="http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=milan%20bull%27s%20balls">spinning on the bull’s balls in Milan</a>. Notice how that fulltext query effectively retrieves a pile of images, taken by different people, of the same <a href="http://www.virtualtourist.com/travel/Europe/Italy/Lombardy/Milan-148247/Local_Customs-Milan-Torinos_Bull_at_the_Gallery_to_be_squeezed-BR-1.html">curious custom</a>: [...]

]]> By: Aaron Johnson – Links: 8-7-2009 http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/08/03/talking-with-cathy-marshall-about-tags-digital-archiving-and-lifestreams/#comment-129824 Sat, 08 Aug 2009 08:48:39 +0000 http://blog.jonudell.net/?p=1825#comment-129824 [...] Talking with Cathy Marshall about tags, digital archiving, and lifestreams « Jon Udell Two interesting phrases / quotes: a) the use of "intentional tagging" and b) "…For psychological reasons, people will want to think in terms of monolithic containers that keep stuff in one place, and monolithic services that do everything related to that stuff. For architectural reasons, though, we’ll want to federate storage, and also decouple classes of service — so that storage, for example, is orthogonal to access control and authorization, which is orthogonal to social interaction." (categories: collaboration computing tagging socialsoftware information ) [...]

]]> By: Jon Udell http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/08/03/talking-with-cathy-marshall-about-tags-digital-archiving-and-lifestreams/#comment-129765 Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:39:32 +0000 http://blog.jonudell.net/?p=1825#comment-129765 > nobody ever gives a tag “bull’s”

Yeah, but that was my (poor) example. Her findings are more nuanced. For example, that people almost never use verbs — like ‘spinning’ — as tags, but do use them in descriptions.

]]> By: Alexander http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/08/03/talking-with-cathy-marshall-about-tags-digital-archiving-and-lifestreams/#comment-129761 Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:28:17 +0000 http://blog.jonudell.net/?p=1825#comment-129761 Cathy’s search on tags failed for two reasons: a) nobody ever gives a tag “bull’s” and b) you cannot find in tags, if images are not tagged. So, instead of making a conclusion that tags don’t work, a simpler conclusion — people do not tag as often as they write descriptions.

]]> By: Ken Kennedy http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/08/03/talking-with-cathy-marshall-about-tags-digital-archiving-and-lifestreams/#comment-129743 Mon, 03 Aug 2009 15:34:09 +0000 http://blog.jonudell.net/?p=1825#comment-129743 Interesting. I haven’t listened yet, but my guess is that Cathy has a bit of an ingrained preference against tags. I say that b/c when looking at the tag-based flickr query that returned no results, I took 10 seconds to ponder it. I went back to the fulltext one, and noted that several of the photos ARE tagged; I saw “milan”, and “balls”, and “bull”. So I changed “bull’s” to “bull” in the tag-based query, and got multiple results: http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=milan+bull+balls&m=tags

Now, her point is still relevant; the tags still don’t get you as many images. But arguably, the failure of “bull’s” vs. “bulls” is just coding…’tag query’ has to understand the same issues of possessives, pluralizations, etc. that text queries have been tackling for years now.

And the tags do give you some bonuses, including the ability to play with flickr’s “clusters”, machine-tagged metadata (like location), etc. So there is goodness in both places, IMO. I get her point, but there are multiple points of view.

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