Folksonomies or Tagsplotion
Folksonomy is a lot of things but I’m going to focus on the popular tagging aspect of it. The problem I have with tagging is that it’s not clear on how I can/should use it. Thinking deeper into the problem i’ve realized my problem is wanting to tag things in 2 different ways and the current model of tagging doesn’t support this.
The first way is for myself or coming up with my own classification for the world of information I sift through. This is extremely useful for faster recall and in even smaller levels, individual sites that I want to come back to often (think bookmarks).
The second way of tagging is for the better of the community. Using the same classification the rest of the world is using to describe certain pieces of information for better community recall. This isn’t taxonomy just yet because you’re not forced to define something in a certain way. The best example I can think of to describe community tagging is “a measure of re-affirming tags that have already been defined to information or adding tags for the benefit of clarity for the community as a whole”.
For me, I might only need one or two tags and I’ll know to always go to one or two of those tags to find the information I want. Whereas using community tagging, you need to think how others may look for the same information and providing a clear/relevant tag(s) to the data being defined.
The Beyond Folksonomies: Knitting Tag Clouds for Grandma panel I left earlier today made me feel a bit better about what I’ve been struggling with. They didn’t have any answers to the problem but openly clarified there is a problem and that we need to figure it out.
I wasn’t quite sure people or the community knew that and hearing them say so reassured dramatic thought being done by many on the issue.
Two things I haven’t thought about (brought up in the panel) was the value of tagging on media (music, video, etc…) and the value of context.
For media, let’s take video - video is extremely hard to search through so tagging becomes quite valuable in letting users know what information is within said video.
For content, don’t avoid it by only using tags, let content provide the context to the tag. I’ll write about this part a bit later.
So - those are my initial thoughts on tagging, folksonomy, tagsplotion, whatever you want to call it.
