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Folksonomies In Del.icio.us and Flickr

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the power-to-the-personages dept.

Ian@falsepositives.com writes "Lots of discussion going on about 'folksonomies' -- bottom-up taxonomies that people create on their own -- as used in Del.icio.us and Flickr: Adam Mathes has a thesis on Folksonomies; IFTF's Future Now makes a point about problems with folksonomies: no synonym control ( "mac" and "macintosh" on Del.icio.us); no hierarchy and content types; and only simple one-word tags. Joho the Blog notices a discussion about what to call it in Mob indexing? Folk categorization? Social tagging?, and John Battelle links into Taggle and "federated tagging". I wonder if a Google Suggest like system might reduce 'lazy tagging' ,and maybe synonym control when the federation appears. Tag, you're it!"

3 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. Another article on the topic by Peter+Cooper · · Score: 4, Informative

    A study of tagging on del.icio.us .. "A mini-ethnography of social practices in a distributed classification community"

  2. What is Del.icio.us and Flickr? by joebetoblame · · Score: 5, Informative

    I didn't know either so I looked it up

    ...more info at http://www.adammathes.com/academic/computer-mediat ed-communication/folksonomies.html

    Del.icio.us http://de.licio.us/ henceforth referred to as "Delicious") is a tool to organize web pages. A description online states it is: "a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others" (Schachter, 2004)

    Flickr http://www.flickr.com/, a photo management and sharing web application, has a similar system of free-form tagging for photos that was adopted and modeled after Delicious. It too requires users to create a user account, and is free to join.

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  3. Learn to read by samael · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's not that complicated a concept - systems have arised which allow you to categorise your own information (bookmarks and photos in the two examples given). Because everyone can use whatever categories they find useful for themselves this means that I can tag my Mac stuff "mac", you can use "Macintosh" and someone else can use "Apple", leading to miscommunication.

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