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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. 'lazy tagging' by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  2. I'm just tagging my Flickr photos now. by Kris_J · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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.

  3. Social tagging on audioscrobbler by jacoplane · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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.