Via Ryan King,
via Ericka Menchen
comes the idea that the term folksonomy is problematic
because we apply it both to systems in which authors tag their own content as well as to systems in which users can tag
the content of others. I'm not entirely convinced this is problematic (nor am I convinced a clean-edged distinction
between the two can be found in most systems), because in both cases, nobody (author or user) is beholden to some a
priori defined hierarchy into which they must stuff their content. The point is — the "folks" get to choose our own
(multiple) tags/categories, whether we're earmarking content for ourselves or for our audiences.
Still, the distinction is an interesting one: how does the intended "audience" affect tagging practice? Do we choose
"safer," more established tags when we tag for others, versus the more "localized" tags we might give to bits of data
we just want to be able to find later? And, is there any reason we can't have the best of both worlds, with our sets of
"proprietary" terms living quite happily side-by-side with the more "global" terms we know that others might latch
onto? And then, what happens when some significant percentage of users actually adopts the same "proprietary" tag —
e.g. the del.icio.us tag
.toread is semantically meaningless, yet so many users have adopted it
that an RSS feed of that tag is actually rather curiously interesting. And what possibilities does it open up when tags
are no longer limited to semantically meaningful words or phrases — when they take on more of the character of a
programming variable than the character of language? What impact is that having on the ways we share, sort, analyze and
discover new information?
The trouble with folksonomy? User versus author-tagging.
Reader Comments
(Page 1)3. "We badly need a taxonomy of tagging systems"
Blasphemy!! We need a folksonomy of tagging systems!! :-P
I agree, there is much collapsed into the term "folksonomy" that glosses over a lot of detail we should really be paying attention to. Then again, the term is still useful as a catch-all for the folks who don't care so much for the distinctions, who can still get the gist of the idea and make use of folksonomy in a practical sense. Just as there is a ton of detail collapsed into the term "social software," and yet folks who don't eat, sleep and breathe the stuff (and just who are these people? I don't currently know any, but the NYTimes tells me they exist... ;)) can still make use of the tools without needing to dive deeper into the details, and without at all infringing on the ability of others who are interested to do so.
Posted at 8:05PM on Dec 18th 2005 by barb dybwad
4. The issue of who performs the tagging is quite important to establish strong semantics. If the author of a text defines the tags, this is no different to defining meta tags and we've had that for years! The benefit of tagging is allowing any member of the public to apply semantics. We then aggregate all of these tags describing the particular entity and come up with a range of tags that are presumably much better than what the author could have come up with.
The most common tags will float to the top and we can 'trust' these results. If 1000 people all tag an article as "sport" you can be very confident it discusses sport. On the other hand if an author describes an article as "sport" it could actually be a spammer trying to get you to their gamlbling site.
For further details, checkout this post I made a while ago:
http://tahpot.blogspot.com/2005/03/semantic-web-who-should-we-tag-today.html
Cheers,
Chris
5. I disagree that author tagging is no different from metatags. Metatags were about labelling content *only* for others, whereas author tagging is partially so but perhaps more heavily about labelling content for oneself, in order to be able to easily find something later. In that case, there is far less incentive to spam and far more incentive to generate personally meaninfgul metadata (whether semantic or not).
Stewart Butterfield describes this well:
"Because tags are first and foremost for people to organize their own photos--and if they weren't, it wouldn't work. It's a happy accident that the whole global collection emerges."
http://scilib.typepad.com/science_library_pad/2005/02/stewart_butterf.html
Posted at 8:05PM on Dec 18th 2005 by barb dybwad
6. I have implemented a folksonomy at http://www.bigblogzoo.com
If you have any comments or suggestions I would be eager to herat them.
kinds regards
kent gibson
Posted at 8:05PM on Dec 18th 2005 by kent gibson
1. There's some further splits here.
Author tagging in an author controlled site like a blog has different constraints to author tagging in a group site. The first is mostly about re-use and search by the author and partly by readers. The second is about advertising. If you imagine a Craigslist that used tagging instead of the current categories, there would be lots of attempts to spam the system.
Another split is where tags are applied by the community but editable by the community. eg WikiPedia categories.
We badly need a taxonomy of tagging systems ;-) There's too much fine detail that is being lost because we dump all of it into the folksonomy/tagging bucket.
Posted at 8:05PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Julian Bond