Folksonomies Tap People Power

Folksonomies Tap People Power

Folksonomies Tap People Power

Some think Technorati's folksonomy will get bogged down in spam. But others say it's a terrific system that brings together the tagging systems of several popular services. View Slideshow View Slideshow If the photo-sharing site Flickr is any indication, the world of digital photographers is dominated by cat people.

Dog owners would probably object. But because of Flickr's tagging system, which allows the photographers or other users to assign identifying tags to most photos on the service, we know that Flickr hosts 23,081 images tagged with "cat" or "cats" and only 17,463 with "dog" or "dogs."

Clearly, Flickr's system was not set up to motivate a feline-canine supremacy contest. But it does illustrate the way thousands of the service's members use tags to give some contextual meaning to more than 3.5 million pictures that might otherwise get lost in the shuffle. But it goes beyond cats and dogs: Users also tagged 21,660 photos "wedding," 12,681 "sanfrancisco" and 12,409 "halloween."

"The job of tags isn't to organize all the world's information into tidy categories," said Stewart Butterfield, one of Flickr's co-founders. "It's to add value to the giant piles of data that are already out there."

These days, a growing number of sites whose content is user-created rely on tagging systems, also known as folksonomies, for the added value Butterfield is talking about. Flickr and the social-bookmarking site Delicious, along with Furl, are generally considered folksonomy trailblazers, but now sites like MetaFilter and the blog index Technorati have jumped on board, and more are expected to follow.

"It's very much people tagging information so that they can come back to it themselves or so that others with the same vocabulary can find it," said Thomas Vander Wal, the information architect credited with coining the term "folksonomy."

"To me, they're a great new organization tool for applications and large content sites," said Matt Haughey, the founder of MetaFilter. "Tags are great because you throw caution to the wind, forget about whittling down everything into a distinct set of categories and instead let folks loose categorizing their own stuff on their own terms."

It hasn't always been easy to get users to take on such responsibility. But as more people understand what tags are, how they work and why they're important, the number of participants in folksonomies has grown.

"Tags are great, but the thing that is hard is getting people to use them," said Caterina Fake, who co-founded Flickr with husband Butterfield. "But the thing that has happened recently is they've become part of a social arena in which they are valuable not only to the individual but to the group."

Naturally, for such informal systems, no two folksonomies work exactly the same. Actually, argued Vander Wal, there are broad folksonomies and narrow folksonomies, and they are entirely distinct.

"Delicious is a broad folksonomy, where a lot of people are describing one object," Vander Wal said. "You might have 200 people giving a set of tags to one object, which really gives a lot of depth.... No matter what you call something, you probably will be able to get back to that object."

In a broad folksonomy, Vander Wal continued, there is the benefit of the network effect and the power curve because so many people are involved. An example is the website of contemporary design magazine Moco Loco, to which 166 Delicious users had applied the tag "design."

But 44 users had also assigned the URL the tag "architecture," 28 "art," 15 "furniture" and so on. That means that because so many people applied so many different tags to Moco Loco's site, it could be located in a number of different ways.

Conversely, Vander Wal explained, Flickr's system is a narrow folksonomy, because rather than many people tagging the same communal items, as with Delicious, small numbers of users tag individual items. Thus many users tag items, but of those, only a small number will tag a particular item.

"You don't have quite that capability of the power curve," said Vander Wal, "but you do have that ability of adding metadata to an object."

Haughey said MetaFilter's tagging system has been useful because by allowing people to tag their posts, including the tens of thousands of entries the site has accumulated since its birth in 1999, it brought some order to the site.

"I wanted the authors of a post to help organize them, so the archives could be more useful," he said.

Technorati's folksonomy is organized by categories defined by bloggers, who add tags to their blog posts. The result is that clicking on tags, such as "Current Affairs," brings users to the latest blog posts aggregated by Technorati with that tag.

Technorati's tag results also display results for the same tags on Delicious and Flickr.

Vander Wal said that because Technorati's system works by having blog posts with embedded tags that point to Technorati, which in turn point back to the posts, it "becomes a huge magnet for spam."

But Cory Doctorow, an editor of popular blog Boing Boing, disagrees.

"Technorati tags blend three different internet services and three services' worth of tags to tease meaning out of the ether," Doctorow wrote. "Brilliant."

To Steve Rubel, author of the blog Micro Persuasion, folksonomies are a boon for marketers, who, he said, can get real-time views of what user sites like Flickr or Delicious are interested in.

"Where the eyeballs go," Rubel said, "there's an opportunity to experiment with marketing."

Rubel also said he'd like to see services like Google add tags as a way to bring more user-specific context to search results. As it is, he explained, search-engine results differ from tag searches in that they are not based on user-created content.

"One of the things that's nice to see is that people are actually spending time tagging and doing it in a social environment, and following the power curve and the net effect," said Vander Wal. "The more people getting involved with it, the greater the value."

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