Full Circle Associates

I'm been ragging on tagging a bit lately. When I saw this post, I wondered if it was a guilt-induced rant! Dan Bricklin wrote Systems without guilt where every contribution is appreciated

In reaction to, and support of, AKMA's post about tagging, Dave Winer writes that he stopped tagging the categories of blog posts. As soon as he missed one he felt guilty and then as the guilt grew he tagged less. He started just assigning things to a couple of categories and then not tagging at all.

I think Dave has pointed out a key problem with tagging. It seems like a nice idea but it requires us to always do it. The system wants 100% participation. If you don't do it even once, or don't do it well enough (by not choosing the 'right' categories), then you are at fault for messing it up for others -- the searches won't be complete or will return wrong results. Guilt. But because it's manual and requires judgment you can't help but mess up sometimes so guilt is guaranteed. Doing it makes you feel bad because you can't ever really do it right. So, you might as well not play at all and just not tag.

This is the opposite of what I was getting at in my old Cornucopia of the Commons essay about volunteer labor. In that case, in a good system, just doing what you normally would do to help yourself helps everybody. Even helping a bit once in a while (like typing in the track names of a CD nobody else had ever entered) benefited you and the system. Instead of making you feel bad for 'only' doing 99%, a well designed system makes you feel good for doing 1%. People complain about systems that have lots of 'freeloaders'. Systems that do well with lots of 'freeloading' and make the best of periodic participation are good. Open Source software fits this criteria well and its success speaks for itself.

So, here we have another design criteria for a type of successful system: Guiltlessness. No only should people just need to do what's best for them when they help others, they need to not need to always do it."

Thanks Dan. You made me feel a little less guilty today.