Quick notes on folksonomies

Here are my raw notes from the folksonomy session on IA Summit:

FOLKSONOMIES

To bad Steward Butterfield couldn't make it.

*GeneSmith (introduction)
- examples: flickr, gmail, vimeo, del.icio.us, etc
- words: folksonomies, free-tagging, social classification
- "it's a type of post-coordinate indexing"
- kinds
-- Broad, many tag one rescource, furl, delicsious
-- Narrow, few tag one resource, flickr
- matrix
-- public vs private (gmail) tags
-- my stuff (gmail, furl) vs others stuff
- Weinberg: Taxonomies are trees, folksonomies are leafes raked together

*Morville
- Context is clue - free-tagging will never make it to forrester.com
- Hierarchy and CV are becoming more important in these areas
- Leaves are just food for trees, which live much longer!
- ex. googleserach for "miserable failure" - content owners lost control over aboutness
- There has been a popular impression at all times that people want anarchy that is not correct. People really want structure and hierarchy
- Hierarchies are Not Going Away

*VanderWal
- folksonomies allows a "long tail" of narrow, idiosyncratic metadata
- Emergent vocabularies can be used for marketing, user researh, etc
- CTRL+L makes Acrobat Full Screen!!!

*BadPeter
- Recap of Metadata for the Masses
- Folksonomies are tapping in to users mental models
- Simply tagging whats in your mind *is* better than nothing
- New terms are added every second, in stead of after months of comitte meeting in the CV-comitte
- View your tags in flickr gives postive feedback loops that ensures some degree of consistency
- Problems
-- Synononyms, ex NYC newyork newyorkcity on delicious - a findability problem
-- same terms mean very different things, ex. flow - flow chart, flow psychology, etc
-- Some terms are plain wrong - arcehology has nothing to do with dinosaurs!
- Re Adaptivepaths' standard path-illustration: tags are shortcuts, never laid out by an architect
- What about linking freetags to reel taxonomies and normal classification?!
- Tags allow for a poetry in classification that is nowhere else to see, ex "me" on flickr - a personal quality that "self-portrait" can't portray
- Discverability, i.e. "color" on flickr, is different from findability
- Tag inversion: people start with a tag (squaredcircle) and add content to that - metadata creates new communities!
- The message "Go forth and tag as you will" creates new behaviours and possibilities

*Discussion
- PeterMo:
- Taxonomy vs folksonomy - both extremes have problems.
-- Taxonomy is wonderful, exept nobody uses them
- Folksonomies presents a wonderful research opportunity, ala search logs
-- What do people want from HP, what do they think about the products?
- PeterMe: Never underestimate the power of selfishness (delicious)
- JJG (Special Guest Star): One problem with folksonomies is to think that it's a Magic Bullet that solves hard IA problems, like Autonomy and some other memes as of lately. It won't - it's still hard work.
- Lou Rosenfeld: It's not either or - we should adapt to it.