Folksonomy
We’re talking about folksonomy for class tonight. Reading list here.
I’m re-reading a lot of stuff on it today and a few new ideas have come to me.
Many people defending folksonomies cite the difficulty of geting people to classify objects within a strict taxonomy. I think its quite obvious that non-experts will always have difficulty and be reluctant to categorize in taxonomies. I think a key thing to realize with regard to folksonomies, is that not only to they open up the categorization to more people, but they open up the creation of the vocabulary. And isn’t that just as important?
Joshua Porter says:
taxonomies may fail to reflect the language of users if they are not fully tested with the target population
I say, why not just let the target population create the taxonomy/vocabulary/whatever?
Its likely that as we get more experience with folksonomies that we’ll be able to build stuff on top of them that’s more controled. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of folksonomies is likely to yield some interesting new ways to deal with information.
May 3rd, 2005 at 6:26 pm
On the reading list, you may want to discount the Wikipedia entry on Folksonomy as it has been blatantly wrong. The entry changes with the wind it seems. All the other entries are rather good. The best two in this bunch are the Adam Mathes and Joshua Porter articles.
You may also want to question Technorati as a folksonomy tool as it is not, it is about social tagging but the focus of the tagging is completely wrong. Folksonomy focuses on the person consuming the information being the person creating the tag not the content creator. There is a huge difference cognitively on how tagging is approached.
May 3rd, 2005 at 11:29 pm
Yeah. I wasn’t too impressed by the Wikipedia article, myself. Then again, I had read all of this stuff ages ago (where months seem like ages on the Inkernet).