Comments on: Folksonomy Schmolksonomy

By: Kent

Kent — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 02:29:06 +0000

I have just implemented a folksonomy with hierarchy (3 level max at the moment), it is still pretty much in its infancy and potentially buggy, however if anyone wants to try it, it is at http://www.bigblogzoo.com.

You use the tree to navigate to one of the blogs or feeds and then you press ‘animalise me’, which brings you to the folksonomy.

If anyone has any comments I would be very interested to hear them:

http://www.syndicatescape.com/bigblogzoo/

By: John Norris

John Norris — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 13:50:23 +0000

Folksonomy

Folksonomy for Pottery Folksonomy is when people can append freely chosen keywords to organize data ( wikipedia .) As noted the other day, people are uploading pottery images to Flickr and organizing them.

By: mcharper

mcharper — Mon, 07 Mar 2005 12:49:54 +0000

Sorry, that should be here.

By: mcharper

mcharper — Mon, 07 Mar 2005 12:44:49 +0000

You can create a kind of hierarchy by bookmarking the URLs of your del.icio.us tags themselves as well. I wrote about this in this post del.icio.us links and hierarchies.

By: fling93

fling93 — Fri, 28 Jan 2005 21:13:53 +0000

I don’t think Shirky was excoriating ontology so much as hierarchy, which he mislabels as ontology, as Rick Thomas commented. Shirky’s point about strict hierarchy’s weakness (needing to predict the future) was valid, and tagging’s simple method to get to an object via several paths illustrates this.

And yes, you can implement hierarchy via tags by simply having some tags being strict subsets of others, and it should be simple to extend the functionality of the tools to support this more easily.

By: Chris L

Chris L — Fri, 28 Jan 2005 18:44:32 +0000

ring data. At the same time, a “little bit of hierarchy” is a lot like being “a little bit pregnant” and I have to side with Clay that the minute the process starts becoming a top-down initiative for classification is the minute that system is doomed to– if not failure– certainly a limited application.

By: Chris L

Chris L — Fri, 28 Jan 2005 18:43:00 +0000

I think it’s obvious that folksonomic systems will see changes both due to a desire for specificity as you describe as well as simple social conventions that make particular tags for particular kinds of items de reigeur if not outright necessary to link-in properly to other systems sha

By: nadezhda

nadezhda — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 18:00:27 +0000

I agree completely that to make del.icio.us really powerful it needs other dimensions such as hierarchy. But in fact, del.icio.us has a rough & ready hierarchical capacity “built in.” I just use the MediaWiki convention of adding a colon after a main word and then name a subcategory. So I’ve got categories (or namespaces, whatever) and subcategories. It’s a personal hierarchy within a flat system.

People I work with know my little system and can subscribe to those tags — only drawback right now with del.icio.us is that it doesn’t have multiple inboxes, so I can have multiple personally-tailored aggregated feeds. But I can achieve something similar by grouping related tag feeds in categories in my RSS readers.

There are all sorts of things you can do with del.icio.us to personalize how it works for you and, with a small group, how the group shares info and actionable items.

My first brainstorming is on my blog — Eureka, persononmies! but I’m finding new ways of doing things with my small group about five times a day right now. Hopefully the innovation pace will slow down a bit by next week — it’s making my head hurt sometimes!

Overall, my main insight — with a bit more flexibility and a bit more power (e.g. multiple inboxes) — del.icio.us can do a fantastic amount of stuff — including building hierarchies and controlled vocabularies. But it’s bottom up built — it’s not that the system creates the structure, it just gives you the tools. You adapt them to your use needs.

What I think Shirky’s really right about is that this is a use process, not a classification system. Not being an IA pro, I find the fundamental conservatism and “control freak” mentality of some quite amusing. Shirky just seems to be reacting to those in the IA field who are allergic to the idea that users might muck up their systems.

Related point — del.icio.us doesn’t have to change much — most of the core features they’re working on cleaning up will create the foundation. Others can introduce services to power users that give them the means to manipulate their del.icio.us tags and feeds. Still others will come up with del.icio.us interfaces for the people who want a no-brainer interface for their friends & family blogs, etc.

So there will be competition among “elaborators” to produce tools that help people use their del.icio.us and extract more user value out of their del.icio.us.

That means del.icio.us itself becomes a utility and its development of functions should take the KISS approach. It should focus on scalability, reliability, and the core functions that make it possible for others to build complementary tools.

What’s worrying me right now are the economics and permanency of the thing if everybody starts using it as a utility. e.g., do I have a backup capacity if a main chunk of my personal CMS is sitting on del.icio.us and they can’t handle the volumes?