Tagging Gone (terribly) Wrong

Tagging items with keywords that are meaningful to us and assumedly to other online viewers sounds like a great idea - and it is. What could be better that helping like minded people find the same things we like, using the vocabulary that we share?

But...what about when tagging goes terribly wrong? There's a phenomenon called "protest tagging" where folks tag products, books, videos and anything else they can tag with purposefully misleading descriptions. The single most obvious example of this would be Ann Coulter's recent book, "Godless: the Church of Liberalism." Let the political rhetoric begin...

Take a look at "The Long Tail of Ann Coulter" [on LibraryThing] which details the popular - and very political - tagging of the book.

Here's another summary from Michael Huang's technology blog: “Ann Coulter's Godless shows up [on Amazon.com] as the #1 result, with 9 instances of 'poop'. Other top tags include: hateful (143), lies (101), propaganda (80), evil (73), fascist (64), hateful divisive political rhetoric (49), and horsecrap (48). What I find interesting about the tag "hateful divisive political rhetoric" is that 49 people all tagged it the same 4 words -- it's not "divisive political" or "hateful rhetoric" but "hateful divisive political rhetoric". I'd guess it likely that whoever tagged it "hateful divisive political rhetoric" probably also tagged it "horsecrap" too.” [Micheal Huang]

Yes, that's right - Amazon.com shows Ann Coulter's latest book ranked first under the search tag "poop".

LibraryThing has tried to examine the vialbility of tagging in, "When Tags Work and When They Don't".

Just to be fair - viewers of MySpace TV have also tagged Ann Coulter - she's in the top 10 search results for "pundit"!