Sorting Out Social Classification

Tagging and Folksonomies in Practice

Gene SmithAccess 2005

October 17, 2005

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

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

Some Examples

Social Bookmarking

Media Sharing

Weblogs Other

“Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using simple tags.”

- Wikipediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Folksonomy

“Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using simple tags.”

- Wikipediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Folksonomy

Collaborative Categorization

• Tags are shared• Feedback loop

Simple Tags

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

– “sometaithurts”

Kinds of Folksonomy

BroadMany users tag one

resource

Examples:Del.icio.us, Furl, Digg

NarrowFew users tag one

resource

Examples:Flickr, Technorati

“The old way creates a tree. The new rakes leaves together.”

- David Weinberger

“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

“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

“It’s 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

“It’s 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

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

Two core questions

• What’s 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?

• “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.”

• “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?

• “Tagging bulldozes the cost of classification and piles it onto the price of discovery.”

– Ian Davis

The Big Messy Web

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

Problems with Tagging

• Findability• Collection Management• Accuracy• Scalability

Benefits of Tagging

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

The Green Pages

• Expertise Directory• Intranet Application

– Name– Business contact information– Skills– Responsibilities

Features

• Synonyms– Basic authority file – “Tagging tags”– Adding descriptions

• Suggestions– Google Suggest * Flickr

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”

Authority, Accuracy and Trust

• “Knowledge is messy”• “There’s 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?”

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

Summary

• Tagging is augmentation– Re-findability, user engagement

• Tagging is an immature tool• Consider the ecosystem of discovery

– Search, taxonomies & tags playing together