Amazon, E-mail Contacts, and CTRL + F: Tagging Predecessors

While reading about del.icio.us on Mathes’s “Folksonomies,” I kept thinking about similar programs. The main one was the “favorites” function on Internet Explorer (as well as many other browsers.) This function allows the user to add web pages and categorize them. It wasn’t until the sharing function of del.icio.us was described that I understood the full implication of this application. As a piece of social software, it connects users, in this case with the benefits of viewing websites that other users who connected to the site you are currently visiting, also visit. It is a sort of recommendation system based on actual viewing patterns, as opposed to advertising.

A useful comparison is with another predecessor, Amazon.com’s customer reviews; according to Mathes, these customer reviews are an “integral aspect of online commerce [that leverage] consumer created metadata to create sites that are far more informative than comparable commercial sites.” Honest, uncensored, consumer input is a significant alternative to advertisements; it oftentimes gives both good and bad outlooks, so potential buyers will really know what to expect. Del.icio.us is similarly beneficial, offering an option other than Google, with its limitations, for finding information that others found helpful.

Going back to even further predecessors of tags in general, I thought of e-mail contact functions, such as those found on Microsoft Outlook Web Access, Pomona’s e-mail center. To make this comparison, I find it necessary to first present a definition of what a tag is; Mathes describes tags as “keywords…[that] allow users to describe and organize content with any vocabulary they choose.” Essentially it is a label for grouping. Similarly, Outlook enables one to create contact groups, whereby independently existing contacts can be included in a list; when that list is entered under “to,” everyone in the group is sent the e-mail. The label is a tag that organizes content (e-mails), and it can be anything the user wants it to be, from the standard “PDAC mailing list” to the random “people who like junk mail.” Outlook’s contact features clearly fit the “tag” description.

One final predecessor is the “find” function (control + F) of a typical computer. It utilizes the user-specified keyword to organize all relevant sections of the document in which that word or phrase is found. (Actually, it just hilights the word where it appears in the text, which still serves the purpose of organizing. A similar function can also be found on Amazon.com where the customer can search inside the given book to find all sections which include a given keyword.) The find function makes the actual content the label, the tag. Its limitations are that it is limited to the document it is in, and the keywords are not completely at the user’s discretion; only keywords that are found in the text will yield any relevant sections.