Vander Wal on T'rati tags and cross-culture tagging

I dunno. I agree that findability is the most valuable goal, but I think some of this stuff is just "fun" as means, not as ends.

People like creating links in their social networking sites, even if those links aren't useful. People like sorting their albums alphabetically, or organizing their hockey cards. Or stamps.

It's fun to tag items.

Obviously this whole issue is populated by some very smart and thoughtful IA types, I just wanted to throw a different perspective in based on this and the last post.

I would like this stuff to work better. I would like to find more stuff more easily and have more people find my stuff more easily. But even if what's there now is mostly broken, it's "fun" (and by that I mean there is an emotional component that isn't logical) to think of tags and to add 'em to something. It's another channel for communicating, as well as a vicarious connection with other readers.

What you're saying, if I interpret correctly, is that bad usability or poor information architecture is acceptable if that's what the user wants. If that's what you're saying, I agree completely.

Sometimes, in the quest for good usability, some designers forget to consult with the user on their wants and instead prescribe 'best practices' onto them.

Steve - I agree, and that's something I've been thinking about quite a bit. I don't think del.icio.us does any one thing particularly well (even the refindability piece is mediocre, IMO).

And yet there's a kind of magic in it. All your friends are there, you're sharing these pieces of net culture (or programming, or whatever your thing is), and it *is* fun. This folksonomy talk really misses that point.