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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!"
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.
That was the single most incoherent paragraph I have read in awhile. I'm afraid to RTFA because it'll probably result in me contracting brain cancer somehow.
Wha.thef.uk
I must need more sleep.. that looked like complete gibberish to me.
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
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.
A study of tagging on del.icio.us .. "A mini-ethnography of social practices in a distributed classification community"
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.
Bringing your mosaic ideas to life. Mosaiclegs
Instead, these systems works because there are so many participants, it doesn't matter if you miss 50%, 80 or 90% of them because of differing tag names.
This is the first slashdot blurb I've ever read that left me feeling like I had no f'n clue what they're talking about. It was like reading the mental vomit of an ADD kid.
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
no synonym control ( "mac" and "macintosh" on Del.icio.us)
Aren't words what people make them to be? I mean, if many people, from the bottom up, decide that "Mac" should be primarily a synonymous of "Macintosh" (which it is, de facto), then secondarily an acronym for an ethernet card address, then for TV addicts a short for Duncan McLeod, so what? Who's to define what words mean if it's not the people who use them?
I mean look at the French: they have something called the "French academy" that makes up a bunch of words willy-nilly every year, after much discussion, to be added to the "official" french language, but without consulting the potential users (the French). Well guess what: most of these words aren't known, let alone used, with precious few exceptions.
So I say great: if grassroot efforts end up redefining the language, and help consolidate new words into the core language, and help create new words and expressions, I say fine. That's what defines a living language that people like and use.
This all looks like nothing more than a filing system for the anally retentive.
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.
My Journal
/* Note: this is going to be off topic, so I don't mind if it gets modded that way */ I read the damn thing at least 3 times... not that I didn't understand for first (I know about it all over, and the linked stuff) but for the plain reason that I just couldn't believe my eyes someone could put together a paragraph which sounds so totally out of language non-human gibberish all over. My head just hurts. Indeed.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
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).
Lots if discussion going on about fragglemat. Toxic taxidermists tipptoe on people creating their own. As seen in Flippsonomatic De.li.ri.um.
Flicker, flicker, *wink* *wink*. ITVTVTT-TV WTF?
Future Now makes a point in being later than yesterday. No synonyms controll mac for macintoshes. Herarchy one-word-tagged content-types.
Jojo-Joohohoho - The Blog! Notesdiscussion What-about-what?
Mobsinjection? Folksoflippsonomy-Calegari?
Taggletaggle (the federated social one)?
Wonder, wonder, google, google.
Makes me lazy, makes me hazy.
Tag! You are it.
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I allways had the impression that slashdoters and the slashdot editors were stoned beatiks, but this guy obviously double dosed his morning share today.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Do you mean teh intarweb?
Random is the New Order.
It only seems to hold as long as the controller/owner of the system succeeds in keeping porn or other aggressively commercial media out of its systems.
When that happens, popular keywords will soon start referring to porn and such media and the designers will need to think of other ways to determine relevancy of terms/keywords/tags to an object.
The article is interesting and relevant to any "unspoiled" community tag-database. But imo, it has little value when talking about systems that have been open for some time to the commercial scum, that seems to succeed in filling every nook and cranny of the internet.