Folksonomies on Slashdot: revised, restated and summarized

Hopeless optimist that I am, here's a revision of my original post ( much improved?) and a summary of the (on topic) discussion.

Lots of discussion going on about 'folksonomies' - bottom-up taxonomies that people create on their own - as used in (recent web sites) Del.icio.us (http://de.licio.us/), a shared bookmarking web site referred to as “Delicious”, and Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/), a photo sharing web site.

Folksonomies (the first meme of 2005?) is attributed by Wikipedia  to Thomas Vander Wa.

Adam Mathes has a thesis on Folksonomies which examines user-generated metadata as implemented and applied in two web services - Del.icio.us and Flickr - designed to share and organize digital media to better understand grassroots classification.

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.

Are these features or bugs? Consensuss says 'feature'. Andrew Ducker has a suggestion for synonyms and a modest proposal to make things even better.

Joho the Blog notices a discussion about what to call it in href="http://www.peterme.com/archives/000444.html">Mob indexing? Folk categorization? Social tagging?

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.

New: In Beyond Laser Tag and Telephone Tag, JC Francois wonders if "2005 will be the year of tagging".

Will Folksonomies lead to the nirvana of the Semantic Web, or at least Semantic web light? (see : ftrain.com August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web)

It might be worth revisting Cory Doctorow's Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia from 2001. Does Folksonomies make Metadata less crappy? (see Distributed classification through self-interest or Rationalise My Tags)

Update: back in October I noted Towards tag-based bookmark management in web browsers?. and more to chew on TopicMaps and Tagalicious


Tag, you're still it!"

categories: del.icio.us

as seen on HotLinks (Thanks Jeff!)