What tagging is (and what it isn’t)
It’s not easy to categorize restaurants. It sounds easy, but once you try, it becomes what Noah calls “a rabbit hole.” You can start out with the classic phone-book classification by cuisine (Mexican, Italian, Chinese, etc.) but things go off the rails very quickly. Does “sushi” get its own classification? Should Tu Y Yo be classified as Mexican along with Taco Bell and the San Francisco burrito carts? Probably not, but then how do you classify it?
How many attributes does a restaurant need to have? Its hours, address, and telephone are obvious, but what about descriptive attributes like whether it can serve alcoholic beverages? Whether or not take-out is available?
If you’re already familiar with a few so-called “Web 2.0″ applications, you’re already familiar with tagging. If you’re not, the concept may be a little confusing at first. Tagging, or labeling, allows site users to attach their own attributes to something like a restaurant, and in doing so, apply their own classifications.
This sounds complicated, but it really isn’t. As a user, all you need to do is consider what keywords describe a restaurant for you. You don’t need to worry about describing it completely, just describe it as you understand it. Someone else may have other tags to add. I tagged Sound Bites with “breakfast“, “waffles“, “pancakes“, and “ballsquare” (the name of its neighborhood,) so I described it with a meal, some dishes, and a geographic description. Now it’s classified, in an incomplete way, by cuisine and geography. Someone else may add “coffee” and “brunch”, refining the classification without major reorganization.
I used “takeout” on Bueno Y Sano and Antonio’s. Both Antonio’s and Pizza Paradiso are tagged with “pizza,” but Antonio’s is also tagged with “slices“. Audrey is tagging restaurants in French, which creates another classification in another language that doesn’t necessarily match the classifications in English.
In short, tagging lets us all create a categorization of restaurants (and everything else on the site) that is flexible, dynamic, and created by the community, not imposed upon it. Click the tags themselves, and you’ll see a list of all other restaurants (or other entities) which have been tagged with the same tag.
There’s a limit to what tagging can handle, though. I tagged Bub’s with “barbeque“, “barbecue” and “bbq“, which are three ways of saying the same thing. (OK, I missed “bar-b-que.”) Why? Because I had no way of knowing what someone else might be looking for. What if I tag Wally’s with “sandwich” and someone is searching for “sandwiches“? (Or “hogs”?) Or what if I tag Blue Ribbon with “trythis”, which has no real meaning to anyone but me?
And any way I try to come up with to describe a restaurant’s hours using tags becomes a complicated mess very, very quickly.
Any registered user can tag things on our site. Go ahead, give it a try.
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