Despite the hype, users lag on tagging

Angus Kidman
Friday, 02 February 2007 08:24

Your IT - Home IT

How is that a study which shows that almost three-quarters of us can't be bothered tagging content online has been so widely reported as suggesting tagging is popular?

Tagging -- adding information to online content such as text, photos or videos to make it more easily searchable and accessible -- is one of the hallmarks of Web 2.0-style consumer-driven content activities. A much-reported study, carried out by the Pew Internet & American Life project, surveyed 2,373 adults to assess how frequently they indulged in tagging activities.

The results showed that tagging hasn't exactly spread across the Internet like wildfire. Only 28% of respondents said they had ever tagged content, and only 7% had done so in the past day. Even leaving out the "don't knows", that left 70% of people for whom tagging was an entirely irrelevant activity.

Arguably, the study might still be overstating the numbers. The key question participants were asked was "Please tell me if you ever use the internet to categorize or tag online content like a photo, news story, or a blog post." That question would encompass not only people who voluntarily tag content left by others on sites like Flickr -- the focus of the study and its associated discussion -- but also individuals who tag their own content on their own blogs or video posts, but have no interest in doing so for other people's content.

"This is the first time the Project has asked about tagging, so it is not clear exactly how fast the trend is growing," the study notes. Later, it concludes: "The act of tagging is likely to be embraced by a more mainstream population in the future because many organisations are making it easier and easier to tag internet content." Possibly, but we'll need to be asking different questions to be sure.