Sig: When the tag cloud gets bigger, the problem becomes: which tags should I pay attention to? And with iffy tags, the cloud does grow big quickly.

So, I’ll expand on your fun painting analogy. :)

In the Pandora example the experts have defined a few very “picturesque” tags — only a few of their tags or genes are needed to paint a good picture. These experts are like great painters who need only a few strokes to express their message.

Non-experts paint with dirty finger paint without delicate strokes. They use a lot of tags, lots of iffy strokes to paint their picture. Whoever looks at a picture painted with these words must think harder to figure out what it represents.

Herein lies the problem: in many cases “thinking harder” is not an option. People scan read. They focus on the first three words of headlines (even that’s pretty optimistic). We can’t ask them to look at a tag cloud of 50 tags and “figure it out”.

With masses you may fall into the trap of using/misusing “expert tags” (like the tags in your post) in a non “expertly” way and thus a clash. Precise word with iffy meaning (unless you’re trained in a “standard”) is worse than many iffy words that as a whole can make up some sense for the untrained.

Use imprecise and “iffy” tags, allowing for use of multiple tags to overlap in any number to narrow down towards understanding/finding.

That is what happens when you paint a “picture” with words, tell a story or three using different angles - then (almost) all can understand precisely what you mean… dawning upon them as they listen. But at the end the word themselves are iffy and daily words. You just need enough of them with some relationship as in a story.

Thanks, Tim

In the case of Pandora, it might work, as music is a pretty well-defined “box”, which is thus easy to label. Also, in the case of Pandora, it is worth to note that that kind of classification works only in a system like pandora: would you be able to categorize music which you produce yourself like that or does it require the 3rd party?

So, who’s the expert who can categorize the specific content? My personal paper drafts are classified by me and the system works well enough. In that case, I am the expert. In a closed system like Pandora, the classification works partly, because it is a closed system.