It's a sad fact in the business world that sooner or later, you will run into a client or boss who'se idea of communication is to slather as many catch phrases into a single sentence as humanly possible.
A co-worker of mine just ran into a client like that and now I'm dealing with the fallout. The culprit catch phrase of today?
"Multi-Tagging"
To which I secretly think to myself... What The Fuck?
As an Information Architect, I'm pretty sure I know what the hell a Tag is in the context of navigation and websites. But hey, for the sake of clarity let's see what Wikipedia has to say about it:
A tag is a keyword or descriptive term associated with an item as means of classification by means of a folksonomy. Tags are usually chosen informally and personally by the author/creator of the item — i.e. not usually as part of some formally defined classification scheme. Tags are typically used in dynamic, flexible, automatically generated internet taxonomies for online resources such as computer files, web pages, digital images, and internet bookmarks (both in social bookmarking services, and in the current generation of web browsers - see Flock and Mozilla Firefox 2.0x). For this reason, "Tagging" has become associated with the Web 2.0 movement.
All well and good. Tags are a very popular feature in most sites right now, YouTube and Flickr being very good examples.
Now let's try our friend's "Multi-Tagging" through Wikipedia...
Huh.
No Results.
That's okay, maybe he's working with a different vocabulary. Let's try Google...
Nothing, but there is a rather interesting article here:
"Electrochemical Multi-Tagging of Cysteinyl Peptides during Microspray Mass Spectrometry: Numerical Simulation of Consecutive Reactions in a Microchannel"
Apparently, our client somehow wants us to apply an extremely sophisticated Chemistry procedure involving Microspray Mass Spectrometry to build a website.
Wonderful.
Seriously though, I can't help but get a tad peeved, but that might just be me.
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2 comments:
You said: Tags are usually chosen informally and personally by the author/creator of the item — i.e. not usually as part of some formally defined classification scheme.
That is normally a keyword. Tagging is normally done by those who consume not create or manage the information. I am not sure if that helps with the customer/client.
Hi there, vanderwal.
Interestingly, assigning Tags to a certain item is both done by the author/creator and at times by the consumer.
An example of Author assigned tags would be those found in livejournal. People who post new entries are allowed to set their own tags. I believe Youtube also allows people who upload to apply Tags to their own work.
However you are correct, there are also sites that allow consumers to apply tags that they personally feel to be appropriate for an item.
Thanks for pointing it out! :)
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