Tags vs. Hierarchy
Mar 16, 2009 Enterprise 2.0
They were easy enough to do, why not do more?
Tags vs. Hierarchy
Tagging Advantages:
- Results are much more contextual*
- Community tags
- Fits into many ‘categories’
- Tags are user generated
- Not lost in a sub-sub-sub folder
- Findability increases
- Learning increases
*With hierarchies you are limited to one category in which to place information. In reality, one piece of information may fit MANY different categories (sub-sub folders for example) and may fit in one for a particular context and not in the same for a different context. Tags allow for more than one ‘category’ and this information is not pigeonholed into one.
March 17th, 2009 at 2:21 am
In a great many contexts, tagging is preferable. But not all of course. Sometimes by going with flat tagging you’ll lose valuable information — such as situations where the items/info/concepts being do in fact bear a hierarchical relationship to one another. This isn’t just for family trees or corporate structures either — there are plenty of things in the world that have conceptual parent/child relationships between them, and that is good info that a hierarchy system can convey nicely.
I know you didn’t say otherwise — you were just extolling the virtues of tagging here. But I just thought I’d toss this observation into the mix… as a plea for retaining hierarchy systems where it makes sense too. Plus… there is no reason you can’t have both… a hierarchy structure complete with breadcrumb trails (even multiple placement in the structure/trails, like with eBay categories) in addition to open, flat tagging by users too. Then you get best of both worlds!
March 17th, 2009 at 3:58 am
I use both tags and a few folders for my documents on my laptop: everything gets a tag (or several–Quicksilver and Hazel makes this a breeze) and some of those also get dropped into folders. Makes for super-quick retrieval.