Worthless Tag

Can somebody enlighten me on the “fiction” tag on LibraryThing? Is there any point at all? Animal Farm is fiction? Really? Talking pigs and you have to tag it as fiction?

For all it’s coolness, LibraryThing is filled with these worthless tags: DaVinci Code is a “Mystery” or “Thriller”, something I could have gotten from the jacket cover or the amazon.com description. I guess for a book I’ve never heard of, like Forsyth’s Avenger, it’s nice to have some meaningful tags. But then again, 3 people have rated Avenger. I’m not likely to read a book that only three people have read.

I suppose I’m missing the point of LibraryThing. Where’s the incentive for me to add books? So I can remember them later? Actually, I’ve got a nice physical space for that: my bookshelf. Do I add books so that I may measure my intellectual prowess compared to other book-readers? Sorry, I’m not really into that. I like books based on the ideas inside them, not the number on my shelf, and I’ve never been big on name-dropping for giggles. (After all, I’m not a philosophy major, so I don’t have to name-drop.)

I certainly understand rating books, a la Netflix, for recommendations. But for the life of me, I can’t understand tagging them with anything more than if (and when) I finished it, if I enjoyed it (unnecessary because of the rating system), and if I recommend it (meaningful since I may like a book, but wouldn’t always recommend it. Maybe recommended-for-genre-fans or the like.)

In short, stupid, worthless tags does not a good web2.0 make.

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One Response to “Worthless Tag”

  1. Tim
    June 18th, 2006 at 10:11 pm

    Hey, the LibraryThing guy here. Here are some responses. I hope you don’t mind.

    1. First, “you can’t argue about taste.” If it meets a need, it meets a need. With over 4 million tags in the system, LibraryThing book tagging is meeting a need. That it doesn’t appeal to you is a strong reason for YOU not to tag books.

    In fact, many LibraryThing users don’t tag. I haven’t run the numbers, but there’s a clear relationship between the number of books a users has and whether a user tags or not. This is a good sign of what tags are useful for, namely organization.

    1. I think you’re coming at tags wrong. As Joshua Schacter says, to work, tags have to be about memory, personal memory. Tags CAN bubble up to some other sort of “community” meaning, but they don’t have to. And they don’t generally bubble up without being based firmly in individual memory, and individual need.

    Systems that front the community meaning of tags over the personal meaning tend to be both useless and unused. Amazon, for example, has book tags, but they’re not about you, they’re about the global level. As a result, few use them, and those that do mostly do “opinion” tags–”sucks,” etc. Now THAT’S useless.

    As said, the “community” use of some tags is pretty debatable. On Del.icio.us tags like “to read” are notorious for being “worthless.” They don’t mean much to anyone other than the tagger. And thats… fine. I do, however, get a kick out of the LibraryThing tag “unread.” It’s got a lot of big, difficult books on it. I love “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell” (far and away the “unread” winner) but even I admit it’s pretty hard to get into.

    Actually, “fiction” is a special case. It is used directly in LibraryThing’s rough determination of genre–along with some other fiction-pointing tags–and feeds directly into recommendation algorithms. So, while it may be true that people who own “Advanced Perl Programming” own books by Neil Gaiman, most people see recommendations like that as junk. So LibraryThing uses a rough understanding of genre to restrict recommendations–well, SOME recommendations, it’s rather complicated–to same-genre items.

    1. You write that you can’t understand tagging books, but make an exception for opinion tags. Thus, for you, tagging is communicating with others. My opinion is exactly opposite. I don’t CARE about what other people make of my tags. I don’t tag to help anyone out.

    I tag because I have too many books, and shelf-order isn’t good enough. If you leave apart the fact that my collection is split between states, and a good part of it boxed, I still have too many books to deal with. Shelves are, of course, a useful way to organize thing, but a book can only live one place. I have a lot of books about Turkey, and a lot of books about archaeology and a lot of books about Hellensitic history. The trick is, these are overlapping categories! A book has to live on one shelf or another. Tags allow me to assign a more representative organization scheme.

    1. Lastly, to talk down another LT feature, I don’t agree about ratings. I don’t CARE what other people rate books. Ratings are meaningless. Most people don’t share my taste. The same goes for most reviews, particularly on Amazon.

    The trick with LibraryThing is that you can find out whether a given rating or review comes from someone like you or unlike you. Once I know someone shares a lot of my books, their reviews and ratings become interesting to me.

    The same goes for Netflix. Their primary utility isn’t to tell you about any-old good movies, it’s to inform a recommendation service that matches you up with movies that would be good for YOU.

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