Folksonomy recapitulates Ontology
by coelomic
One doesn’t have to stray far to come across the neologisms “Folksonomy” and “Tagging” on the web these days.
Companies are developing business models on it, hundreds have taken to it with great passion, and it has been hailed as an integral part of web 2.0. Mildly piqued, I tried the services “del.icio.us” which is definitely a fantastic service, in making sense of the burgeoning content on the web.One does not have to spend much time on the service to discover new content or see pages on content you never knew existed.
I have now copied all my bookmarks to this service.
Here in the following paragraphs I shall try and put forth an argument why the concept of “tagging” will remain the bastion of the early adopters.Though very interesting, it will remain just that and not help us break new ground in bringing order to the web or analyze its content in a more efficient manner.
For starters I am going to use the habits of wildly successful del.icio.us users as enshrined by “slacker manager”
Habit One: Make many marks
Wikipedia describes tagging as such “a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords”. If I see an interesting web page, in days gone by I would bookmark it, in the process I stand to lose not knowing whether there are other such sites, that people with similar tastes, found interesting. Lets not dwell on the morality of stashing a good link without sharing it! Enter tagging. I now have to assign apt keywords that would help me find the link using search and also convey to others who come across the link, what the content is likely to be. That is quite a job. It transfers the act of bookmarking from the computer to the person doing the tagging. In essence it is more work and takes more time. 43 Things, delicious, technorati maybe all the rage, but the truth is that these ecosystems are sustained by early adopters who are eager to adopt new technologies. The majority of computer users do not have the time or the initiative to tag, either for themselves or for the community. They browse and search online for information and expect smart algorithms to do the searching and cataloging for them.
Habit Two: Sir Tag-A-Lot
Yahoo! is betting on the community to give their search results a human touch thereby delivering people more relevant search results, that have been looked at by taggers who have given it their seal of approval. Tags are after all loosely bound metadata.
The problem with this approach is that it makes two highly unlikely assumptions.
1) every tag ever assigned to a link is relevant and,
2) just because a tag has been assigned to a link means that it is valid.
There is absolutely no way of verifying that. Now comes the call to tag a lot. Lets take the example below. Tags are also assigned according to the point of view of the individual tagging and what he/she sees in a post rather than the actual contents of the link. Thereby links quickly accumulate a huge array of irrelevant tags that have absolutely no bearing on the actual contents of the tagged matter. If such a database is searched then the chances of irrelevant results turning up are quite high, for the results are not verified as to their authenticity. Whereas Google follows a method wherein links would be linked to content of a similar nature and has a higher chance of turning up results of a relevant nature when searched against.
A tag is a tag is a tag
It is not odd to find absolutely ludicrous tags in the tagosphere. I quote a few examples below;
* system:unfiled
* 73
* todolist
* todonovember
* toread
* smartmon
* the_process_of_manufacture
When does a tag cease to be a tag? With no standardizations in place anything goes. what means something to me maybe total garbage to you. It is made worse by using utilities such as “lazy sheep” to copy tags added by others. I am not sure that the practice of tagging has made the internet more organized? It still remains to be seen but tagging sure is keeping a few of us occupied, me included.
Technorati Tags: bookmark, folksonomy, link, tags, web, webweb, webweb
Great observations, it’s good to see someone else coming to a similar conclusion about tagging.
While your concerns around ludicrous tags aren’t completly dealt with without some human editing, using BookmarkSync clusters I think I’ve found a way around many of the problems with ‘tagging’ that you’ve highlighted.
BookmarkSync has been around for nearly 7 years and it remains a very simple system for keeping your bookmarks synchronized across several machines, browsers and operating systems.
I’ve added the utility of the system by automatically creating related clusters of bookmarks based upon the individual users hierarchical naming conventions, without any extra effort by the user.
When several users store a link into the same cluster, there is a much better chance that the link will be relevant to the cluster topic. Since the system is using information that the user is already supplying as part of their normal bookmarking activities, it doesn’t involve the extra work that tagging does.
If you are interested and would like an account to do some testing, please visit http://www.sync2it.com or write me directly.
Excellent article, quite thought-provoking.
I agree, tagging is far from perfect, comprehensive, or universal. I agree that it tends to be something that some people (though not necessarily just early adopters, IMHO) tend to do assiduously; while others do it randomly. In my experience, some people are more inclined than others to tagging habits and the tagging mindset. These tend to be the people who realize some direct benefit from tagging, or who view their tagging efforts as the creation of a unique body of work.
This is the case with my tagging efforts. I use two regularly: Furl and del.icio.us. Furl I use because it stores a searchable copy of anything I bookmark there, which I find useful for my work. I tag things in Furl not so much with the purpose of sharing, but rather for categorizing in relation to the projects I’m working on. Del.icio.us is where I tag for sharing. It’s how I create my list of recommended reading links in the sidebar of my weblog Contentious.com
If I didn’t view these efforts as the creation of unique bodies of work and if I didn’t realize benefits from them, I probably wouldn’t bother. Just tagging for the sake of tagging isn’t enough for me. For others, it is.
However, I also realize benefits from the tagging efforts of others in two ways: It helps me identify opinion leaders or experts; and sheer serendipity.
Opinion leaders play a huge and important role on the net. They create most of the value you find online. To me, it doesn’t really matter that most of what’s available online is disorganized crap — the opinion leaders and experts are the ones who create the jewels, and they make the whole chaotic scramble worthwhile.
Serendipity is the other key to value on the net. Exploring others’ tags often leads me to surprising discoveries. I think it complements the search focus in a surprisingly useful way. I think of tag exploration as “focused randomness.” It tends to provide relevant serendipity.
At least, that’s my experience of it. I’m not disappointed that tagging isn’t as comprehensive, reliable, or meticulous as taxonomy. It serves different — and complementary — purposes.
And even though, from the perspective of some people, tagging serves little or no purpose — well, it’s easily ignored. So it doesn’t really hurt anything, does it?
Thanks,
- Amy Gahran
Editor, Contentious.com
[...] This morning I stumbled across a thoughtful exploration of tagging from someone who is not enamored with the process or results. Check out “Folksonomy Recapitulates Ontology.” Despite its leaden title, this article offers a fairly plain-language and fair examination of the pros and cons of tagging. [...]
[...] It is nearing the end of another year and I need to write one last post. I did receive considerable mail to my last post on tagging. In this I shall dwell on the concept of tagging in a little more detail. [...]
I’ve also been wondering if tagging has the potential to move beyond the early adopters. I suppose it remains to be seen. A related question I’ve been thinking about: How many taggers does is take to reach critical mass? del.icio.us and flickr work well, but they have hundreds of thousands of users. Imagine tagging pages on an intranet. Could a system with just 50 taggers be worthwhile? 500? 5000? What’s the tipping point?
Nice post. Two things:
You wrote: “I now have to assign apt keywords that would help me find the link using search and also convey to others who come across the link, what the content is likely to be. That is quite a job. It transfers the act of bookmarking from the computer to the person doing the tagging.”
Kind of, but not really. With bookmarking, you have the option to place the bookmark within in a user-defined folder (you don’t *have* to). The naming of the folder is analogous to the act of deciding a tag. The difference is that you can assign multiple tags to a bookmark (you could also dupe the link in mutiple folders too).
re: when is a tag a tag, this is good point. See this ‘emergent tags’ post that is somewhat related: http://bokardo.com/archives/web2con-emergent-tags/
Hi
I’m wondering what is the benefit of text-tagging?
(the picture-tagging is beneficial because you can hardly make a good search engine based only on the pixels)
Is it providing a more relevant search results that google?
Was it started to do so or just to tag?
Hi,
this is why i didn’t start using del.icio.us ’till now. i was too lazy to enter tags, i’m using all the available shortcuts in software applications to type less.
but, i recently discovered firefox del.icio.us extension and encourage other people to use it. it features the following:
* Context menu integration
* Toolbar integration
* Sidebar integration
* Keyboard shortcuts
* Find all people that have bookmarked the currently loaded page
but the best thing is; you right click on a web page, choose del.icio.us from context menu > Post current page (or alt+shift+s) and a menu appears.. you choose recommended “swap all” or popular “swap all” and tadaa… if the link you bookmarked is already in del.icio.us (which is rare if it isn’t) you can tag the url with a single click.
http://delicious.mozdev.org/
I’m a massive fan of del.icio.us. When I read the ‘habits of wildly successful del.icio.us users’ article, it felt alien to me, like del.icio.us is some sort of competition. I feel like you’re assuming that that is the only way that the site can be used. I tag entirely selfishly for my own benefit and not for others, I don’t care if some tags something in a weird way as I don’t go round reading all the tags for a particular link! And I use it as a supplement to browser bookmarks and google rather than to replace them.
As a bookmarking tool, I use it for things that I might want to look at again one day and want a way to find but won’t want to in the near future. I use my browser bookmarks for the things that I think I’m likely to want to refer to soon or regularly.
When I look for stuff on del.icio.us, I’m looking for either interesting articles (something you can’t search for on google!) or good websites about a particular topic, again something google can be a bit hit or miss on (choose a topic you are interested in and compare the first page on google and the first page on del.icio.us and you’ll probably find they are quite different).
[...] WordWorks » Folksonomy recapitulates Ontology discusses the pros and cons of tagging (suggests that tagging will remain the bastion of early adopters) (tags: del.icio.us folksonomy tag tagging web2.0) [...]
Focusing your argument on individual, “ludicrous” tags misses the power of collective tagging by a mile.
You said:
“[tagging makes] two highly unlikely assumptions.
1) every tag ever assigned to a link is relevant and,
2) just because a tag has been assigned to a link means that it is valid.”
Tagged resources (like del.icio.us or Flickr) rely on _neither_ of these assumptions. One bad tag can no more pollute the tag pool on a social bookmarking site than one bad link can invalidate Google search results. That’s because both classifying systems rely on collective “wisdom of crowds” to drown out the noise of bad tags/links.
Now, there are real reasons why a lot of smart people don’t get this right away. For one, tagsonomies are still kind of version 1.0 right now and haven’t developed the user interface conventions that would underscore their “crowd wisdom” better. For instances, any of the tagsonomies could easily show you the top three (or five) tags for an item in bold to better emphasize “consensus” tags. Or, when you search for a tag they could list most popular items that have the given tag as a “consensus” tag, perhaps grouped by the most popular secondary “consensus” tags.
One reason tagging fails to blow everyone’s socks off is that many haven’t learned the “tag results dance” to the same extent that they already have the “search results dance” down cold. Few people would be shocked to search Google for “spam blockers” and get results including canned meat and football linemen. Yet, people expect tagsonomies to be more precise somehow.
Finally, I’d like to point out (as others have) that tag systems are rich, collective feedback loops. That’s one of the most important characteristics of all the Web2.0 coolness going around that critics forget. Let’s say a great article on “tagsonomy” gets initial tagged with “todo webstuff splunge.” A rational person would never find it, right? Well, not for long. Chances are (and this is all about Internat-scale attention of crowds) other people will read the same article and one (all it takes is one) will tag it with something slightly less lame, say “tags.” This better advertising will mean it is picked up by even more rational people who begin to tag it with “tag tagging tagsonomy” and so on. Soon, the early bad tags will be drowned out by a vast sea of reasonableness.
That feedback loop and the “wisdom of crowds” are the reasons why tagging doesn’t suck even when individual items and tags often do.
[...] Reading: Wikipedia: Tags Wikipedia: Folksonomy Social Analysis of Tagging: Rashmi Sinha A Cognitive Analysis of Tagging: Rashmi Sinha Folksonomy Recapitulates Ontology [...]
[...] Reading: Wikipedia: Tags Wikipedia: Folksonomy Social Analysis of Tagging: Rashmi Sinha A Cognitive Analysis of Tagging: Rashmi Sinha Folksonomy Recapitulates Ontology [...]