I saw a well-investigated article on tagsonomy which had a tiny snippet of a quote that i’ve personally been wanting to expound upon for quite some time.

“Provided a tagging system is mainly for personal value, with social value as a seocond-order benefit (as del.icio.us is), then scale increases varibility and reduces the constraints of consensus.” – http://tagsonomy.com/index.php/dynamic-growth-of-tag-clouds/

It’s my personal belief that tagging systems which provide personal mnemonic value are inherently more likely to succeed in scaling into a community tool of usefulness. I personally love del.icio.us because I bookmark things with my own personal view of the world, rendered through tags in my own words. Browsing through my tagspace is similar to browsing through my personal memory while having helpful navigation aids. Whenever I need to find a link, I can typically remember at least one tag that I used when I filed it away.

In my opinion, trying to provide users with some of the more advanced tagging features, such as boolean searching , full tag stemming, or tag categorization, does not promote growth in the early phases of a folksonomy, and hence, is not as useful for the creation of a folksonomy. It’s not to say that these features would not be useful on a full, lively, and robust tagged database. But there’s a reason you’re only seeing related tags and tag combos on del.icio.us recently.

For that initial phase, herd mentality is enough to get people into consensus about sharing certain tags, and people are more likely to tag at that first moment that they sense their data will have a long, useful shelf life on a particular database. That’s when you see tagging systems succeed – when people care enough about their metadata to really work hard on it. At that stage, when a user carries a long-term view of their data, it makes sense to tag as a mnemonic device. Once a critical mass has been reached, you start to see more socially-aware tag groups arise, such as the mattsrecumbentbike fad.

Do you know the way that little kids try to jog the memory of others? I grew up with three younger siblings, and i’d constantly hear social requests for memory retrieval (wow, i’m a nerd) that might go something like this:

“Do you remember when we saw that thing that went ‘boom?!’”

And, as an older sibling, you’d have to remind the younger kid that she wasn’t specific enough, and that you’d need more details to know what she was talking about. The younger kid might not fully remember the thing in question, but they remember at least one characteristic of it, even if outsiders have no way to discover the content from the tag context. The way that mnemonic tagging systems work is very similar.

The mnemonic tags that you use are absolutely going to be different than the ones that I use for a particular item. These personally-oriented mnemonic hooks into long-term data dumps of our lives are what form the basis of tagging systems in social software. It’s my opinion that any project that wishes to implement Freetag, or a similar tagging feature, should plan on taking a deep sip of the web 2.0 kool-aid, and figure out how to get their users to take a long term view of their personal identity and data stored within the project.