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.

What the???

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What the???

[alex_ware]

Don't worry just another one of Theese

Re:What the???

[xZAQx]

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.

That pile of shit is ONE sentence.

Slashdot: Where grammar is sacrificed for stories about "revolutionary" technologies such as blogs and other bullshit made up trends that will be nonexistent in 6 months.

Re:What the???

[marketingshift]

I tried to break it down from my 2 yeard old daughter's point of view. Let me know if this works for you. http://www.marketingshift.com/2005/01/folksonomies -toddlers.cfm

Wha.thef.uck?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wha.thef.uk

wtf?!?

[marcushnk]

I must need more sleep.. that looked like complete gibberish to me.

Re:wtf?!?

[Basje]

Hear hear.

At least now I know what my wife is thinking when she sees slashdot over my shoulder. She must feel as I did when I saw this story.

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.

Another article on the topic

[Peter Cooper]

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

What is Del.icio.us and Flickr?

[joebetoblame]

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.

What the hell is this about?

[Loco3KGT]

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.

But but...

[Roland Piquepaille]

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.

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.

Learn to read

[samael]

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.

Re:Learn to read

[Dachannien]

If the concept is so simple to explain (and it is, because you just did it), why was that explanation not included in the article? Instead, they introduce this "folksonomies" term, give an eight-word definition that includes two terms (bottom-up and taxonomies) which need further explanation to put them in the proper context, and expect everybody to understand what's being talked about.

Flippsonomy ossifragged in fragglemat.wtf.com

[Qbertino]

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.