SOCIAL TAGGING / FOLKSONOMY

2.13.2007

Folksonomy is “collaborative categorization.”

Delicious is for geeks

Flickr is for everybody

Naming and Organization via Folksonomy

Hierarchy via Folksonomy

Tagging = Folksonomy/

YOONO: BOOKMARK-BASED FOLKSONOMY

And what about unintentional, “implicit” folksonomy.

Benefits of folksonomy: high relevance, flexibility, low overhead, self-maintaining, reflects emergent perspectives, reflects personal engagement.

Folksonomies

Taxonomists Encyclopedia Editors=

Collaboration

“Expert” perspective

More significantly, folksonomies support discovery—both generalized and personal.

And much more than tagging is involved.

Social behavior informs measures of collective valuation.

Valuation is superimposed against automatically-captured metadata inside a CV.

And also against time

And space.

Complementary Approaches Promote Discovery

Taxonomies mediated by user behavior produce smart recommendations.

Simple preference data supports decisions among similar objects.

In the future, folksonomies will reflect both explicitly-added metadata and behavioral metadata, in tandem with taxonomies:

Supporting powerful personal re-findability and discovery,

As well as increasingly-targeted advertising.

A SHIFTING LANDSCAPE

PEW Internet and American Life:

28% of online Americans have tagged content.

7% do so on a typical day.

That’s a LOT.

People tag to re-find and to promote.

social

transactive

identity-focused

location-focused

Community is what the Web has always been trying to become. It’s an instrument of the human need to form groups based on shared interest. Over time the Web will become increasingly social, multivocal. The role of the publisher will shift toward community leadership and moderation—more agenda-setting and less holding forth, more facilitation and less dictation.

In two years, concepts of online community, social media, social software will disappear, in the same way the concept of connecting a computer to the Internet has disappeared.

The information architecture of the future is less about assigning data to categories and more about understanding what to do with user-created metadata.

When not to do folksonomy:

Certain corporate contexts, or where accuracy is of overriding importance. Car parts, for example. Inventories. Or, if you’re more invested in structure and control than in…

REALITY.

Anything to add, Gary?

Or are you ready to acknowledge the truth?