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Folksonomies In Del.icio.us and Flickr

Posted by timothy on Tue Jan 04, 2005 07:52 AM
from the power-to-the-personages dept.
The Internet
Ian@falsepositives.com writes "Lots of discussion going on about 'folksonomies' -- bottom-up taxonomies that people create on their own -- as used in Del.icio.us and Flickr: Adam Mathes has a thesis on Folksonomies; IFTF's Future Now makes a point about problems with folksonomies: no synonym control ( "mac" and "macintosh" on Del.icio.us); no hierarchy and content types; and only simple one-word tags. Joho the Blog notices a discussion about what to call it in Mob indexing? Folk categorization? Social tagging?, and John Battelle links into Taggle and "federated tagging". I wonder if a Google Suggest like system might reduce 'lazy tagging' ,and maybe synonym control when the federation appears. Tag, you're it!"
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  • 'lazy tagging' (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 04 2005, @07:55AM (#11252676)
    I hate this term, there is no lazy tagging, only different tagging. Tagging using too precise a description, thus too many words is as useless as tagging with too few.

  • What the??? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 04 2005, @07:55AM (#11252677)
    That was the single most incoherent paragraph I have read in awhile. I'm afraid to RTFA because it'll probably result in me contracting brain cancer somehow.
    • I'm glad I was not the only one struggling with that. Sounds, and reads like a bunch of self aggrandizing bullshit to me.

    • Learn to read (Score:5, Informative)

      by samael (12612) <Andrew@Ducker.org.uk> on Tuesday January 04 2005, @08:43AM (#11252887) Homepage
      It's not that complicated a concept - systems have arised which allow you to categorise your own information (bookmarks and photos in the two examples given). Because everyone can use whatever categories they find useful for themselves this means that I can tag my Mac stuff "mac", you can use "Macintosh" and someone else can use "Apple", leading to miscommunication.

      • Re:Learn to read (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Dachannien (617929) on Tuesday January 04 2005, @09:15AM (#11253068)
        If the concept is so simple to explain (and it is, because you just did it), why was that explanation not included in the article? Instead, they introduce this "folksonomies" term, give an eight-word definition that includes two terms (bottom-up and taxonomies) which need further explanation to put them in the proper context, and expect everybody to understand what's being talked about.

        • If the concept is so simple to explain (and it is, because you just did it), why was that explanation not included in the article? Instead, they introduce this "folksonomies" term, give an eight-word definition that includes two terms (bottom-up and taxonomies) which need further explanation to put them in the proper context, and expect everybody to understand what's being talked about.

          It's called "wanting to be hip, even if noone else understands what I say".

      • There is no possible way anyone who was not familiar with this concept could have understood the article summary. It was a big collection of invented words and technical mumbo-jumbo. The submitter should learn to write.
    • ... and is modded up using the collaborative karma system.

      Anyone else giggling about this?

      Or are you all waiting for a post that everyone sane can understand, like how to modify your Gentoo PPC install to use both OSS and ALSA without frying your SBLive?

      *sighs wearily*
      • Or are you all waiting for a post that everyone sane can understand, like how to modify your Gentoo PPC install to use both OSS and ALSA without frying your SBLive?
        *sighs wearily*

        I would take practical advice any day over these meta-abstract pseudo-intellectual discussions that self appointed experts like to get into. It seems every week, there is some new Paradigm That Will Change The Way We Process Information. This one looks just as stupid as all the rest.
        • these meta-abstract pseudo-intellectual discussions

          "big words I don't understand and can't be bothered to click on"

          self appointed experts

          "people actually learning about things and explaining them"

          It seems every week, there is some new Paradigm That Will Change The Way We Process Information.

          This one's been around for months. Tens of thousands of people are using it already. That's worth commenting on, isn't it?

          "I would take practical advice any day" ... and I use this kind of tagging every day. P
    • Lots of discussion going on about 'folksonomies' -- bottom-up taxonomies that people create on their own -- as used in Del.icio.us and Flickr: Adam Mathes has a thesis on Folksonomies; IFTF's Future Now makes a point about problems with folksonomies: no synonym control ( "mac" and "macintosh" on Del.icio.us); no hierarchy and content types; and only simple one-word tags.

      That pile of shit is ONE sentence.

      Slashdot: Where grammar is sacrificed for stories about "revolutionary" technologies such as blogs an

      • Hm? There is no problem with the grammar in those phrases, at least I don't see any. It's also not really difficult to understand - I'm not a native speaker, and I parsed the sentence without any problem whatsoever. It's arguably one sentence, as evidenced by the fact that is just one full stop, but there are other punctuation marks that clearly seperate the clauses, ie. the colons and the semi-colon.
        Granted, I didn't exactly understand the meaning, but that was simply and solely due to the fact that I lack
    • I tried to break it down from my 2 yeard old daughter's point of view. Let me know if this works for you. http://www.marketingshift.com/2005/01/folksonomies -toddlers.cfm [marketingshift.com]

  • Wha.thef.uck?! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 04 2005, @07:55AM (#11252680)
    Wha.thef.uk

  • wtf?!? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by marcushnk (90744) <senectusNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday January 04 2005, @07:59AM (#11252694) Journal
    I must need more sleep.. that looked like complete gibberish to me.

  • I'm just tagging my Flickr photos now. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Kris_J (10111) * on Tuesday January 04 2005, @08:01AM (#11252705) Journal
    And I'm sure I'm not quite matching what other people use, I'm not being consistant even amongst my own stuff and my spelling is probably a little off.

    Meanwhile, this is pretty much what happens in any ad-hoc metadata system, and not all of us have the luxury of paying someone to manage our indexes. The place I used to work is just the same. At least it's better than nothing.

  • Another article on the topic (Score:5, Informative)

    by Peter Cooper (660482) on Tuesday January 04 2005, @08:02AM (#11252708) Journal
    A study of tagging on del.icio.us [typepad.com] .. "A mini-ethnography of social practices in a distributed classification community"

  • What is Del.icio.us and Flickr? (Score:5, Informative)

    by joebetoblame (846146) on Tuesday January 04 2005, @08:11AM (#11252742) Homepage
    I didn't know either so I looked it up

    ...more info at http://www.adammathes.com/academic/computer-mediat ed-communication/folksonomies.html [adammathes.com]

    Del.icio.us http://de.licio.us/ [licio.us] henceforth referred to as "Delicious") is a tool to organize web pages. A description online states it is: "a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others" (Schachter, 2004)

    Flickr http://www.flickr.com/ [flickr.com], a photo management and sharing web application, has a similar system of free-form tagging for photos that was adopted and modeled after Delicious. It too requires users to create a user account, and is free to join.
  • The lack of synonym control is one of the reason "folksonomies" works. Even if say the tags "mac" and "macintosh" might seem like synonyms, what if someone uses the two tags "macintosh" and "clothes" together, for the other kind of macintosh? Would you like those to go under "mac" too?

    Instead, these systems works because there are so many participants, it doesn't matter if you miss 50%, 80 or 90% of them because of differing tag names.

  • What the hell is this about? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Loco3KGT (141999) on Tuesday January 04 2005, @08:11AM (#11252744)
    This is the first slashdot blurb I've ever read that left me feeling like I had no f'n clue what they're talking about. It was like reading the mental vomit of an ADD kid.

  • But but... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Roland Piquepaille (780675) on Tuesday January 04 2005, @08:14AM (#11252756)
    no synonym control ( "mac" and "macintosh" on Del.icio.us)

    Aren't words what people make them to be? I mean, if many people, from the bottom up, decide that "Mac" should be primarily a synonymous of "Macintosh" (which it is, de facto), then secondarily an acronym for an ethernet card address, then for TV addicts a short for Duncan McLeod, so what? Who's to define what words mean if it's not the people who use them?

    I mean look at the French: they have something called the "French academy" that makes up a bunch of words willy-nilly every year, after much discussion, to be added to the "official" french language, but without consulting the potential users (the French). Well guess what: most of these words aren't known, let alone used, with precious few exceptions.

    So I say great: if grassroot efforts end up redefining the language, and help consolidate new words into the core language, and help create new words and expressions, I say fine. That's what defines a living language that people like and use.

  • I'm sorry, but.... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This all looks like nothing more than a filing system for the anally retentive.

  • Social tagging on audioscrobbler (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jacoplane (78110) on Tuesday January 04 2005, @08:43AM (#11252883) Homepage Journal
    Audioscrobbler [audioscrobbler.com] :
    Audioscrobbler builds a profile of your musical taste using a plugin for your media player (Winamp, iTunes, XMMS etc..). Plugins send the name of every song you play to the Audioscrobbler server, which updates your musical profile with the new song. Every person with a plugin has their own page on this site which shows their listening statistics. The system automatically matches you to people with a similar music taste, and generates personalised recommendations.
    The system also has a lot of problems with taggin music. This is because a lot of the time ID3 tags in mp3s are not done correctly. It is then possible to do tag moderation [audioscrobbler.com]. I'm not sure if this is what this article refers to as social tagging, but if it is this is a good example of it working. I've had quite a few badly labeled tracks and artists fixed this way.
  • 1) Most incomprehensible /. blurb EVAR

    2) Adam Mathes is one of those guys I always though really understood the internet as a distributed ad hoc metadata generation system. He's also pretty funny. He was one of the cofounders of the snarky webzine Uber.nu (which I used to write for). He combined the two and invented googlebombing, which earned him a certain degree of noteriety.

    3) I think there is nothing new in these criticisms of distributed ad hoc systems. It's the same with google, and wikipedia. You
  • A few months back I wrote avar.icio.us [burri.to], which does autocompletion and dynamic suggestion of tags based purely on your own tag coincidence statistics. You can see it in action on Bowen Dwelle's site [dwelle.org]: try typing "ja" in the tags field - it should autocomplete "javascript" in the textbox and then suggest a couple more tags beneath. (This is all based on Bowen's own tags) Note that autocompletion only works in Mozilloids and IE/Win at the moment.

    A popular add-on that makes suggestions from other user's tags is
  • I always thought that OPML [opml.org] and Google-like search powers was the beast for this job. Is it being used? It would certainly gather together the disparate threads in a self boot-strapping manner.

    Dave Winer (of Scipting News [scripting.com] fame) always had a bee in his bonnet about this subject and on this he makes sense.
    • I always thought that OPML and Google-like search powers was the beast for this job. Is it being used? It would certainly gather together the disparate threads in a self boot-strapping manner.

      OPML differs in a couple of vital respects:
      1. It's hierarchical. The tag systems discussed here are deliberately flat. (One can argue for hours about the relative merits of each, but let's just say there are strong opinions on both sides)
      2. OPML takes a one-to-many approach to categorisation (one category can hold many
  • All that's needed is a decent design to be built into one piece blogging software. A few people are working on it for Drupal [drupal.org]. Once one popular blogging tool has a simple and elegant solution others will adopt it, just like trackbacks.

    Personally I think the central server(s) should use something like WordNet to determine common synonyms based on context and build from there. I think the fact that the keywords come from so many people is a good thing. Instead of a few people thinking hard about how to o

  • fsck, all giberrish (Score:3, Insightful)

    by l3v1 (787564) on Tuesday January 04 2005, @09:11AM (#11253041)
    /* Note: this is going to be off topic, so I don't mind if it gets modded that way */ I read the damn thing at least 3 times... not that I didn't understand for first (I know about it all over, and the linked stuff) but for the plain reason that I just couldn't believe my eyes someone could put together a paragraph which sounds so totally out of language non-human gibberish all over. My head just hurts. Indeed.

  • The problem is that many modern categorisation systems assume that people know how they want to categorise their own data. They therefore aalow individuals to use whatever word/phrase they want to tag their data with. These tags can conflict both with other users (for instance one user could use "Mac" to refer to items related to Apple Macintoshes while another uses "Macintosh" and a third uses "Apple") and with themselves (when a user's nomenclature changes or they mistype).

    There are a few obvious solut
    • The problem is that many modern categorisation systems assume that people know how they want to categorise their own data. They therefore aalow individuals to use whatever word/phrase they want to tag their data with

      I think this is basically the problem Google tries to solve (http://images.google.com/ [google.com], which relates images to words, in the title of the image files and the text around it on the HTML page) -- the embedded metadata in HTML is often absent, wrong, or deliberately bogus, so the subject has to

  • MusicBrainz/Audioscrobbler have a system that lets users vote on synonyms for metadata. For instance, "The Beatles" and "Beatles, The" both point to the same group tag.

  • del.icio.us and tagging (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 216pi (461752) on Tuesday January 04 2005, @09:16AM (#11253071) Homepage
    Del.icio.us is a bookmarking system. Joshua Schachter programmed it to have a bookmarking system and as far as I know, he did it for himself, not for the public at first.

    So, _you_ add a bookmark, _you_ tag it, so _you_ can organize your links in the way you like it. There are many ways to categorize bookmarks and the tagging system allows you to use multiple ways in one.

    I recreated del.icio.us for porn (porn-a-licious.com [porn-a-licious.com]) and something interesting happend: In the beginning, people tended to tag their posts in the usual way (hardcore, softcore, etc.). Then came people tagging their bookmarks using their favorite porn star names as tags (luba, marketa, etc.). And than came a guy starting to tag them using tags like f, ff, fm, ffm, etc. And now, most people tend to combine all or some of these types of tags.

    there is no horizontal, vertical or other buzzword-way to tag. You just start to organize your bookmarks in the way you like it. And most people may adopt the most useful tag-styles creating a huge, very well organized link list.

    You don't need a synonym control if you have enough users because if the link is important there will be someone who will post that link with tags assigned to them you would use, too. Porn.a.licious is bookmarked often on del.icio.us, and since some users still try to hide their porn-bookmarks, not all tags used were really useful (sometimes, porn.a.licious was tagged with 'cars' or something like that).

  • Flippsonomy ossifragged in fragglemat.wtf.com (Score:5, Funny)

    by Qbertino (265505) on Tuesday January 04 2005, @09:17AM (#11253077)
    Lots if discussion going on about fragglemat. Toxic taxidermists tipptoe on people creating their own. As seen in Flippsonomatic De.li.ri.um.
    Flicker, flicker, *wink* *wink*. ITVTVTT-TV WTF?
    Future Now makes a point in being later than yesterday. No synonyms controll mac for macintoshes. Herarchy one-word-tagged content-types.
    Jojo-Joohohoho - The Blog! Notesdiscussion What-about-what?
    Mobsinjection? Folksoflippsonomy-Calegari?
    Taggletaggle (the federated social one)?
    Wonder, wonder, google, google.
    Makes me lazy, makes me hazy.
    Tag! You are it.

    --

    I allways had the impression that slashdoters and the slashdot editors were stoned beatiks, but this guy obviously double dosed his morning share today.
  • What's a taxonomy without hierarchy? This is just simple classification for indexing and it's a shame to misuse the terminology and make all the ignorant responses above right about the whole article being a blur of buzzwords (... and, God damn it, not programming jargon!)
  • I tend to want to buy a lot more stuff than I can afford. So I add books and other items to my shopping carts, such as at Amazon. My Amazon UK shopping cart has more than a hundred items, all of which I intend to buy at some point.

    Unfortunately, Amazon's shopping cart is painful to browse when it reaches that size. Also, Amazon distinguishes between the current cart and items "saved for later", and moving between them is also awkward. There's also no way to move an item from my UK shopping cart to the Ama

  • Why don't we just call it what it is, meta data?

    How hard was that !

    Arguing about the name of the thing, 'Tags', 'Folksonomies', etc. is all a load of BS as far as I am concerned. The real issue is that we have a means of attaching meta data to other datum in a way that is easy to use and easy for computer systems to digest and parse.

    There is already a standard that allows this - and even allows you to extend it as needed: XML. What is lagging behind are the tools to make that an easy process for the e
    • You are missing the point: Yes, it is about meta data, but what these terms (folksonomies, mob indexing) are describing is the phenomenon of attaching meta data without a prior defined tag vocabulary. It is an evolving tagging system and apparently well worth studying.
    • What's a "dog sky"?

      It's what the sky looks like just before it starts raining dogs. Cats are optional.

      • Well it all depends on where you live. You'll rarely, if ever, see a dog sky in Phoenix. While here it rains cats and dogs roughly monthly. If you're not a "dog person" you do not want to live in Seattle... you'll be hip deep in puppies!

        Where my boss is from pig skies are apparently quite common. Whenever I ask about a raise, he ways "when pigs fly!"

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