Category: Folksonomy
March 20, 2006
Folksonomies in Museums
No, not as a historical arifact of “high Web 2.0 fashion”— as a tool for engaging museum visitors and helping to bridge the “semantic gap.” I mentioned an earlier paper on the steve.museum project. The new paper, Steve.Museum: Exploring social tagging and folksonomy in the museum [PDF], raises a number of interesting ideas and questions, such as: “The resulting folksonomy,… 
November 23, 2005
NFAIS on Web 2.0
A little over a week ago I attended a NFAIS program entitled Web 2.0: Current Realities and a Look to the Future. It was a good time to jump on the Web 2.0 meme-wagon considering the barrage of Web 2.0-related news in the past few weeks (tagging and wikis on Amazon, and big developments with Microsoft and RSS are just…
November 8, 2005
Tags, Collaborative Filtering, and GROOP.US
Rashmi Sinha recently posted, Collaborative Filtering strikes back (this time with tags), discussing the intersection of collaborative filtering (recommendation systems like those on Amazon or Netflix) and tagging. “One of the roadblocks to collaborative filtering is user input, some expression of interest by a user that you can hook into. Tags provide such a hook. On the other hand, tags…
September 15, 2005
Tagging Museum Collections
The September issue of D-Lib (Digital Libraries) Magazine features an article with the hefty title Social Terminology Enhancement through Vernacular Engagement: Exploring Collaborative Annotation to Encourage Interaction with Museum Collections. Essentially, a group of museum and digital library people are trying to find new ways for users to interact with digital collections of art and artifacts using folksonomies. They have…
September 7, 2005
Tags and Disaster Recovery
You’re It, the tagging blog has a new article Tagging for Katrina. The post provides a quick overview of the concept of tagging, and suggests some standardized tags to use. This is a great illustration of the power and adaptabilitty of folksonomies along with their potential shortcomings. Now, go forth and tag….
May 9, 2005
Tag Blog
For about a week I’ve been reading the beginnings of You’re It! a new blog devoted to the subject of tagging, and thought it was time to share. It’s a group blog with (currently) ten authors. Among them are Clay Shirky, who has written regularly about folksonomies over at Corante’s Many-to-Many group blog on social software. And holding up the…
May 3, 2005
Peekaboom: von Ahn and the Future of ESP
I attended an interesting lecture today at Drexel given by Luis von Ahn, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon and inventor of the ESP Game. He spoke about the ESP Game, its potential and uses, and a new game he has designed to aid in developing computer vision. About a year ago the ESP Game was spreading like wildfire. The…
April 17, 2005
Faceted Folksonomy
One of the next phases for creating more useful folksonomies will likely be the introduction of facets to the current tagging systems. A faceted classification is used to describe and organize items according to multiple properties of that item. You’ve probably already encountered faceted search and browsing software at such online retailers as Eddie Bauer and Barnes & Noble. These…
March 7, 2005
Folksonomy vs. the Desktop Metaphor
With all the discussion of folksonomies, and especially tags, I’ve heard little said about the significant change in mindset that this form of categorization represents. It is only very recently in the history of personal computers that the conceptual shift has begun to swing away from strict hierarchical folder structures where a digital file shared the proprety of a physical…
February 3, 2005
Art imitates tags
There seems to have been an explosion of folksonomy-related discussion, including Peter Merholz on the art/life (chicken/egg ?) aspect of tags: These tags are no longer simply keywords that describe something about the content, but instead are the reason for that content to be. In my paper on folksonomies I mentioned the squaredcircle tag on Flickr as such an example….
February 1, 2005
Wired on Folksonomies
Thomas Vander Wal is quoted throughout a new Wired article — Folksonomies Tap People Power — which provides an overview of folksonomies, how they started, and mentions possible marketing implications. (Can folksonomies really highlight user’s interests?) I found this bit interesting: [Steve] Rubel [of Micro Persuasion, a public relations blog,] also said he’d like to see services like Google add…
January 14, 2005
Technorati Tags
Looks like Technorati has jumped on the tagsonomy bandwagon. I thought that this would be an interesting application, its good to see that they pulled it off. (via Apophenia)…
January 13, 2005
Ethnographic Study of Ethnoclassification
Another useful look at [ethnoclassification/tagsonomy/folksonomy/communal categorization], this time with actual users and focusing on del.icio.us. Take a look at Bookmark, Classify and Share: A mini-ethnography of social practices in a distributed classification community by Ulises Ali Mejias (via iaslash.org). […] it is hard for people to make the initial conceptual shift from traditional forms of classification (using fixed taxonomies) to…
January 5, 2005
Folksonomy Update
Now that I’ve regained my sanity after finals and the holidays I thought I would post my paper on the subject: Communal Categorization: The Folksonomy (or PDF version). I would consider it an early draft, but I thought I would put it out there, since many of the ideas are in line with current discussion. The latest in this dialogue…
October 28, 2004
Folksonomy/Ethnoclassification
A few related items this week. I was playingThe ESP Game last week for my Content Representation class. It’s mentioned in a post on IAslash about “folksonomies” this week, which is based off of this OK/Cancel discussion of the need for browsing and mirrors an essay, Metadata for the Masses, Peter Merholz at Adaptive Path posted last week: The primary…