Folders versus Tags

Rashmi Sinha, an information architecture specialist and one of the founding principals of Uzanto Consulting, a user research and interaction design consulting firm based in Mountain View, CA sent me an interesting thread on her blog about the ongoing debate between the use of folders versus tags for organizing large amounts of information.

http://www.rashmisinha.com/archives/05_07/oddpost-folders.html

How about Projects versus Accounts versus Clients versus Timeframes instead?

Thanks for the pointer to the thread. I think Chandler's interpretation of this whole debate is to get rid of the distinction between TAGSs (in Flickr and Delicious, labels in Gmail, Categories in Outlook and Entourage, Smart playlists in iTunes) AND FOLDERS (in most email clients, sets in Flickr and explicit playlists in iTunes).

Tags, Labels, Categories, Smart playlists, Folders, Sets and Playlists are technology-centric. They focus on distinctions in functionality and software behavior.

Instead, Chandler's hope is to emphasize personal semantics. This is a Project groupings versus a Location groupings as opposed to this is a Category versus a Folder.

Beyond such human-centered distinctions, we assume that users will use Projects and Locations in any number of ways, as Tags and/or as Folders. The two important thing we're pinning our hopes on are:

1. To not force users to choose which "technology" they want to use before they've even populated the Project with a single item and
2. To allow users to treat their Projects and Locations first as Tags and then as Folders and vice versa.

I guess the important distinction in my mind's eye is not so much between a folder or a tag...but more between:

1. Explicitly creating a group of items in a top-down manner (ie. collecting them into a folder or playlist) versuss
2. Implicitly creating a group of items in a bottom-up manner (ie. tagging or labeling and then creating a smart playlist or smart folder based on that tagging)

This reduces the debate down to UI affordances (ie. drag and dropping items into some grouping mechanism, be it a Gmail label or an Eudora folder VERSUS labeling an item as belonging to some label or folder).

Consequently we could easily imagine a world in which there was some functionality that collected items into some BUCKET, and users could fill that bucket in a number of different ways: bottom-up or top-down, but that they DIDN'T need to worry about what kind of bucket it was (ie. tag or folder), unless it was a human-centered distinction (ie. a Project bucket versus a Location bucket).

More background

A more detailed analysis of the relative strengths and weaknesses of Hierarchies, Faceted systems and Tags: http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/HierarchyVersusFacetsVersusTags

For some more background on various organizing affordances in Chandler, here's a powerpoint deck of a presentation I made to the California Digital Library staff last week.

• CDLTalk.ppt:

• CDLTalk.pdf: