Folksonomies In Del.icio.us and Flickr

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!"

Comments

'lazy tagging'

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate this term, there is no lazy tagging, only different tagging. Tagging using too precise a description, thus too many words is as useless as tagging with too few.

I'm just tagging my Flickr photos now.

[Kris_J]

And I'm sure I'm not quite matching what other people use, I'm not being consistant even amongst my own stuff and my spelling is probably a little off.

Meanwhile, this is pretty much what happens in any ad-hoc metadata system, and not all of us have the luxury of paying someone to manage our indexes. The place I used to work is just the same. At least it's better than nothing.

This doesn't even make sense.

[Anonymous Coward]

I read the article, I've read the paragraph.

Maybe I'm just having a bad hair day, but it *sounds* so stupid that no one can even explain it coherently.

Social tagging on audioscrobbler

[jacoplane]

Audioscrobbler :

Audioscrobbler builds a profile of your musical taste using a plugin for your media player (Winamp, iTunes, XMMS etc..). Plugins send the name of every song you play to the Audioscrobbler server, which updates your musical profile with the new song. Every person with a plugin has their own page on this site which shows their listening statistics. The system automatically matches you to people with a similar music taste, and generates personalised recommendations.

The system also has a lot of problems with taggin music. This is because a lot of the time ID3 tags in mp3s are not done correctly. It is then possible to do tag moderation. I'm not sure if this is what this article refers to as social tagging, but if it is this is a good example of it working. I've had quite a few badly labeled tracks and artists fixed this way.

del.icio.us and tagging

[216pi]

Del.icio.us is a bookmarking system. Joshua Schachter programmed it to have a bookmarking system and as far as I know, he did it for himself, not for the public at first.

So, _you_ add a bookmark, _you_ tag it, so _you_ can organize your links in the way you like it. There are many ways to categorize bookmarks and the tagging system allows you to use multiple ways in one.

I recreated del.icio.us for porn (porn-a-licious.com) and something interesting happend: In the beginning, people tended to tag their posts in the usual way (hardcore, softcore, etc.). Then came people tagging their bookmarks using their favorite porn star names as tags (luba, marketa, etc.). And than came a guy starting to tag them using tags like f, ff, fm, ffm, etc. And now, most people tend to combine all or some of these types of tags.

there is no horizontal, vertical or other buzzword-way to tag. You just start to organize your bookmarks in the way you like it. And most people may adopt the most useful tag-styles creating a huge, very well organized link list.

You don't need a synonym control if you have enough users because if the link is important there will be someone who will post that link with tags assigned to them you would use, too. Porn.a.licious is bookmarked often on del.icio.us, and since some users still try to hide their porn-bookmarks, not all tags used were really useful (sometimes, porn.a.licious was tagged with 'cars' or something like that).