folksonomy 1
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The Need for Creating Tag Standards at The NeoSmart Files
Web 2.0, blogging, and tags all go together, hand-in-hand. However, while RPC standards exist for blogs and the pinheads boggle over the true definition of a “blog,” no one has a cast-in-iron standard for tags. Depending on where you go and who you ask, tags are implemented differently, and even defined in their own unique way. Even more importantly, tags were meant to be universal and compatible: a medium of sharing and conveying info across the internet — the very embodiment of a semantic web. Unfortunately, they’re not.Back when web directories were still cool, AOL had an effort to build their own based on the Dewey Decimal System. They had 60 contractors in Arizona typing in web urls and assigning DDC numbers to them. This didn't work. But why?
Weblog: Every word in every document is already a tag
Social bookmarking - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Many online bookmark management services have launched since 1996; Delicious , founded in 2003, popularized the terms "social bookmarking" and " tagging ". Tagging is a significant feature of social bookmarking systems, enabling users to organize their bookmarks in flexible ways and develop shared vocabularies known as folksonomies . Descriptions may be added to these bookmarks in the form of metadata , so users may understand the content of the resource without first needing to download it for themselves. Such descriptions may be free text comments, votes in favour of or against its quality, or tags that collectively or collaboratively become a folksonomy .
There's been quite a bit of hype around tagging over ther past year, especially around putting structure around user created data (especially at Flickr and Technorati). At the SES show in New York, I ranted about tagging and the fact that there has been little done to proactively deal with the obvious and inevitable problem with SPAM -- Web pages back in the mid nineties all had facilities to be tagged with meta data, and the first search engines attempted to utilize this functionality, and thus the beginning of search engine spam. If I had a nickel for every starry eyed idealist point to tagging saving the world, I'd be able to fund my own blog search engine... In fact the founders here were 4/5's of the the core team behind the Open Directory Project which, at the end of the day, was an attempt to create a system to categorize web pages in a scalable way.
Weblog: Tagging and Unstructured Data
A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy
This is a lightly edited version of the keynote I gave on Social Software at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference in Santa Clara on April 24, 2003 Good morning, everybody. I want to talk this morning about social software ...there's a surprise.Ontology is Overrated: Links, Tags, and Post-hoc Metadata
Travel agents exist to distribute the interface between a handful of airlines and a large number of consumers. The web replaces this so the TAs claim they add value. What's surprising is that the internet plays tried to use the same argument. They tried to recapitulate the old order rather than undermine it. It took some time for people to realise the problem had changed.
The Three Orders The narrative that tells of the first man and woman encountering the tree of knowledge focuses on its tempting fruit. But after we took the bite, we apparently looked up and got the idea that knowledge is shaped like the tree's branching structure: Big concepts contain smaller ones that contain smaller ones yet. Over the millennia, we have fashioned the structures of knowledge in just such tree-like ways, from the departmental organization of universities (liberal arts contains history and history contains ancient Chinese history) to the hierarchy of species. The idea that knowledge is shaped like a tree is perhaps our oldest knowledge about knowledge.
Taxonomies and Tags
Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags This piece is based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005 -- one at the O'Reilly ETech conference in March, entitled "Ontology Is Overrated", and one at the IMCExpo in April entitled "Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification." The written version is a heavily edited concatenation of those two talks. Today I want to talk about categorization, and I want to convince you that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong.
Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags
social consequences of social tagging. Many-to-Many:
So, if my del.icio.us inbox is any indication, the blogosphere has been abuzz lately with opinions and commentary on “ folksonomy .” It’s interesting stuff, no doubt, especially for those of us who come to social computing from a library and information science background. Unfortunately, too many of the paeans to tagging that I’ve read have completely ignored some of the key social and cultural issues associated with public and collaborative labeling of content, opting instead for a level of technology-driven optimism that I see as overly naive.
A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content ; [ 1 ] [ 2 ] this practice is also known as collaborative tagging , [ 3 ] social classification , social indexing , and social tagging . Folksonomy , a term coined by Thomas Vander Wal , is a portmanteau of folk and taxonomy . Folksonomies became popular on the Web around 2004 [ 4 ] as part of social software applications such as social bookmarking and photograph annotation. Tagging , which is one of the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 services, allows users to collectively classify and find information. Some websites include tag clouds as a way to visualize tags in a folksonomy. [ 5 ] A good example of a social website that utilizes folksonomy is 43 Things .
Folksonomy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Folksonomy. Many-to-Many:
* None of the current implementations have synonym control (e.g. “selfportrait” and “me” are distinct Flickr tags, as are “mac” and “macintosh” on Del.icio.us). * Also, there’s a certain lack of precision involved in using simple one-word tags—like which Lance are we talking about? (Though this is great for discovery, e.g. hot or Edmonton) * And, of course, there’s no heirarchy and the content types (bookmarks, photos) are fairly simple.There’s a post by Louis Rosenfeld on the downsides of folksonomies , and speculation about what might happen if they are paired with controlled vocabularies. …it’s easy to say that the social networkers have figured out what the librarians haven’t: a way to make metadata work in widely distributed and heretofore disconnected content collections. Easy, but wrong: folksonomies are clearly compelling, supporting a serendipitous form of browsing that can be quite useful.
folksonomies controlled vocabularies. Many-to-Many:
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report
Remove Forebrain and Serve: Tag Clouds II In “ Tag Clouds are the New Mullets ” (Daily Report, 19 April 2005), I claimed that the weighted tag clouds meme popularized by Flickr and Technorati was about to cross a permanent shame threshold because of overuse. My comment suggested that the only sin of tag clouds was popularity.While Forman thought the twins should be allowed to die, their doctors struggled to save them. While Ellie lived for only four days, Evan, who endured severe disabilities including the inability to speak or see, died just shy of his eighth birthday. “This Lovely Life” is Forman’s bracing account of becoming the mother of two super-preemies.