it20060311 - Saturday

Panel: J Wynia (wynia.org) / David Swedlow (metastorming.com) / Mary Hodder (napsterization.org) / Liz Lawley (mamamusings.net)

Blog: http://www.beyondfolksonomies.com/

Wynia: What is a folksonomy?

Swedlow: It’s a bottom-up way of organizing information. More informal than taxonomy — “dog” instead of some long latin name.

Lawley: They are a way that people classify things — language and classification are not the same things. In folksonomies, people get to define their own organization, not have it defined upon them by some kind of authority.

Hodder: Usability of current folksonomy interfaces are pretty bad. Flirckr and delicious can have useful elements, but they still have a way to go. Users can be overwhelmed in both the collection and entry phases. Fear of more slicing and dicing as it won’t actually get us anywhere.

Wynia: Recently saw article on tagging problems with delicious: Five months you may have tagged something web design, but now tag it web design. Article suggested implementing rigid taxonomies, which kind of misses the point.

Wynia: Traditional way of handling problems with tagging is to go back and adjust them, but most in the population will be lazy about it and just leave outdated tags. But the fact that these things are already related is already evident in delicious. Maybe build tools that implicity tie specific tags together — web design and webdev, for example.

Swedlow: It’s not folksonomies vs. taxonomies — you really need both. Folksonomies get you to the general area, taxonomies get you to the specifics.

Swedlow: Maybe use implicit tagging.

Check attentiontrust.org. (Hodder is on the board.)
Hodder: Not a big fan of automated tagging. Systems just need to be in place to allow tagging — video site she working on right now pulls from both tagged and untagged sites — sites that allow tagging have almost 100% use. The fact that it’s a little bit hard and that someone had to think what to put forces better information — someone has to care to do it. You’d lose that context if automated tagging was implemented. Quality of information wouldn’t be as good.

Swedlow: Distinction between implicit tagging and automated tagging. Implicit makes use of work already being done. (What? Offer suggestions instead of automatically placing information.

Lawley: Asks for show of hands for who here uses tagging. Most do. “You are not most people.” Most people, even in IT, don’t want to use these sites and features. But it’s giong to start to happen in different contexts — Vista will have some tagging componenets in it. We don’t spend time thinking thourhg use scenarios. How are we going to make users’ lives better? The wisdome of crowds can be overstated (If you look at what democracy has given us it doesn’t always give us the best options).

Audience: Users already use folksonomies with folder structur