Reading Response 15

Cathy Marshall's "Do Tags Work?"

Marshall wrote a very interesting piece on tags and attempts to prove to us how they aren't all they're cracked up to be. I enjoyed Marshall's article and liked how she attempted to add a little humor in the mix. I also agree with her that tags may not be the best way to categorize and label photos but it really depends on the situation. I'm a huge fan of tagging pictures on Facebook. Of course when you have a name and that name has a profile it's much easier to tag someone in a photo and for it to be much more organized. In other situations I've noticed student's who study abroad take tons of pictures of famous buildings, statues, monuments and none of them have them tagged, just captioned. This is where it becomes difficult I'd think to tag a photo of a structure or scene.

I found her example of tags being verbs to be very interesting. I guess what she was trying to point out was that it isn't normal for a searcher to consider a tag to be a verb and unfortunately, using "spin" was actually the best tag for the search for the Milan Bull Mosaic. Most user's will query "Milan Bull" and finish with that, but if it became common knowledge that tags can also be verbs, maybe users will be able to form better queries when searching for their images.