Sorting Out Social Classification Tagging and Folksonomies in Practice

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Sorting Out Social ClassificationTagging and
Folksonomies in Practice

• Gene Smith
• Access 2005
• October 17, 2005

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About Me

• Principal, nForm User Experience Consulting
• Information Architect
• Founding member of the Information Architecture
  Institute
• Advisory board
• Folksonomies Panel, IA Summit 2005
• Blogs
• http//atomiq.org
• http//tagsonomy.com

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Tags Tagging

• Tags
• User-added descriptive metadata
• Tagging
• The practice of
• users adding descriptive metadata to resources
• allowing users to add and share their own
  descriptive metadata

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Some Examples
Social Bookmarking
Media Sharing
Weblogs
Other
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• Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of
  collaborative categorization using simple tags.
• - Wikipedia
• http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy

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• Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of
  collaborative categorization using simple tags.
• - Wikipedia
• http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy

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Collaborative Categorization

• Tags are shared
• Feedback loop

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Simple Tags

• Flat namespace
• No hierarchy
• Simple interface (text box)
• WordsSmashedTogether
• sometaithurts

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Kinds of Folksonomy

• Broad
• Many users tag one resource
• Examples
• Del.icio.us, Furl, Digg

• Narrow
• Few users tag one resource
• Examples
• Flickr, Technorati

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• The old way creates a tree. The new rakes leaves
  together.
• - David Weinberger

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• Folksonomies don't support searching and other
  types of browsing nearly as well as tags from
  controlled vocabularies applied by
  professionals.
• - Lou Rosenfeld
• Building, maintaining, and enforcing a
  controlled vocabulary is, relative to
  folksonomies, enormously expensive
• - Clay Shirky

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• Folksonomies don't support searching and other
  types of browsing nearly as well as tags from
  controlled vocabularies applied by
  professionals.
• - Lou Rosenfeld
• Building, maintaining, and enforcing a
  controlled vocabulary is, relative to
  folksonomies, enormously expensive
• - Clay Shirky

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• Its just as problematic to ignore the
  compelling social, cultural, and academic
  arguments against lowest-common-denominator
  classification
• - Liz Lawley
• The mass amateurization of publishing means the
  mass amateurization of cataloging is a forced
  move.
• - Clay Shirky

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• Its just as problematic to ignore the
  compelling social, cultural, and academic
  arguments against lowest-common-denominator
  classification
• - Liz Lawley
• The mass amateurization of publishing means the
  mass amateurization of cataloging is a forced
  move.
• - Clay Shirky

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Ontology is Overrated

• Classification of the web has failed
• Classification itself is filled with bias and
  error
• Tagging is the solution
• http//www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.
  html

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Two core questions

• Whats a sustainable way to classify the big
  messy web?
• Can a loosely organized network of individuals
  categorizing things for their own interest
  succeed where the librarians failed?

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• Yes, of course it would be easier. This is what
  is so radical about tagging it would be easier
  because other people would do it for you.

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• Yes, of course it would be easier. This is what
  is so radical about tagging it would be easier
  because other people would do it for you.
• Would they? Would you want them to?

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• Tagging bulldozes the cost of classification and
  piles it onto the price of discovery.
• Ian Davis

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The Big Messy Web
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The Big Messy Web

• Ecosystem of Discovery
• Email, Blogs, Search, News, Tags
• Constrained Domain
• Security, privacy, content, community
• Big Messy Web
• Pockets of local structure

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Problems with Tagging

• Findability
• Collection Management
• Accuracy
• Scalability

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Benefits of Tagging

• Increased re-findability
• User engagement investment
• Social interaction community
• Ad hoc user research
• More metadata!

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The Green Pages

• Expertise Directory
• Intranet Application
• Name
• Business contact information
• Skills
• Responsibilities

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Features

• Synonyms
• Basic authority file
• Tagging tags
• Adding descriptions
• Suggestions
• Google Suggest Flickr

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What tagging means

• I am describing my skills
• I share skills with others in my business unit
• I am describing the skills of my business unit
• All/some/few of my skills are relevant

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Authority, Accuracy and Trust

• Knowledge is messy
• Theres duplication/overlap in the skills list
• Can we group different kinds of skills?
• How do you know someone has that skill?
• How do you validate skills?
• Are there liability issues?

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Approaches to managing tag sets

• Capture, contain, cleanse
• Sacrifice agility in the long-term
• Semi-professionalization
• Give engaged taggers tools to help manage the tag
  cloud
• Algorithms
• Scalable

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Summary

• Tagging is augmentation
• Re-findability, user engagement
• Tagging is an immature tool
• Consider the ecosystem of discovery
• Search, taxonomies tags playing together