4pm - Thomas Van der Wal Understanding Tags / Folksonomy

Folksonomy is the result of personal free tagging of pages and objects for one's own retrieval.

tagging is done in a social environment shared and open to others
the act of tagging isdone by the person who...

Value of Folksonomy: is in the external tagging is derived from people using their own vocabulary and adding explicitly meaning, which may come from inferred understanding of the information/object.

People are not so much categorizing, as providing a means to connect items (placing hooks) and provide their meaning in their own understanding.

Folksonomy Triad : Object, Metadata (tag), Identity

Object -> Interest -> Identity

Idenity -> vocabulary-> metadata

object -> definition -> metadata

Object ---(Interest)---- Idenity
| / |
| / |
(Culture) (Vocabulary)
(Definition)
| / |
| / |
Community ---(Terminology)--- Metadata

business = taxonomy
people = folksonomy

The Business Value of Tagging
Business Tensions
Naming Control <--------> People's Vocabulary
In-house <-----------> Outside Service
$$$ w/ value <-------> $ w/ unknown value
consistent <--------> emergent

Business Gains
Improved understanding of customer
Current terminology (all of it)
market segmentations
Ability to easily follow the customer

So, who tags? About 0.5% of people on the web tag (of 750 million folks on web, 2-4 million folks tagging)

Why do people tag?
**Their OWN use/value first
Add perspective/context : Missing metadata, emergent vocabulary, personal descriptors
**Refindability: aggregation of information, task-based aggregation
State Interest
Sociality

Every Tag is Sacred : Every person is an expert in their own vocabulary (tags)

Shape of Tags : nouns (this is a dog, this is blue, swearing)

Where are People tagging? Tag Venues
Social Bookmarking (del.icio.us, RawSugar)
Media (Flickr, Dabble, LastFM)
Shopping (Amazon)
Geo-Location (Platial)
Mobile (Socialite)
Intranet (IBM's Dogear, Scuttle)
OS (files) (Apple Mac OS X's Spotlight)
Wherever there is a digital object or marker (URI)

Building Tagging Services: What do they offer?
Tagging
Descriptions
Feeds
Interface
Additional Offerings : Groups, Favorites, Rating, search, save page

Ineraction
Tags :
Delimited Combinations
Space
Comma
Quotes for compound words
Suggested tags
from own tags
from other's tags
automated from object content
Tag Combinations

Art of the Pivots
RawSugar and its Pivots ((Thomas did not define Pivot, and even showing the page does not define what he means.))

Scanning : del.icio.us (dense) vs. magnolia (lots of white space)

Spheres of Sociality (James Earl Wickey's Theory)
Mass
Collective
Selective
Personal

Filtering
Clustering
TagCloud (TVW is not fond of them)

Shopping : Snippet from an Amazon page

Overall Improvements : tagging is not perfect
Value of Tagging for Non-taggers
Volatility of Tagged Objects
Tethering Needed: When object is updated (corrected/edited), New Content
Granular Social Network