I was just reading an item in Dave Taylor’s blog The Intuitive Life called Technorati tags: Good idea, terrible implementation. There, Dave voiced this complaint:
“What if when I wrote weblog entries about General Motors, I included a special tag, a keyword tag, that let everyone who wanted to read blog entries about General Motors read my weblog article, without otherwise having to subscribe to my blog? Makes sense. Now, should it be gm or GM or generalmotors or general motors or General Motors or GM Corporation or … ?
“Therein lies the fundamental problem with Technorati Tags, as promoted by the popular weblog search system and utilized by a small percentage of bloggers.
…”With almost a half-million tags and with an online community that loves to engage in keyword and key phrase pollution to be more search engine friendly, I posit that the Technorati tags are a failed experiment and are just going to become increasingly irrelevant as the namespace continues to grow without bounds.”
I think the main issues here is that folksonomies (informal, user-created tagging systems like Technorati tags) and predetermined taxonomies (like the Yahoo directory) serve different purposes.
I explained this in the following comment to Dave’s posting…
(This is a comment I added today to Dave Taylor’s blog posting mentioned above)
Hi, Dave
It seems to me that the concept of a folksonomy (which is basically what you see with Technorati tags, and also with services like del.icio.us and Furl, where users are free to create their own tags at will) is pretty different from that of a taxonomy.
A folksonomy merges, diverges, and evolves much the way language does, through usage and interaction. A taxonomy, in contrast, is more like a master plan, rigid and fixed to a certain extent.
In practice, taxonomies are often a pain in the butt to use. They require people to extend effort to abandon their own perceived context and connections (which is what any labeling scheme is about) and instead fit something into someone else’s (often) ill-fitting box.
Yes, the lack of standardization you find with folksonomies is a problem for people who want to do one search and find every relevant result immediately. So folksonomies are not a good idea for libraries, archives, some business systems, etc.
That said, the strength I find with folksonomies is serendipity. With Technorati tags (which I have yet to implement) and Furl and del.icio.us (which I use avidly) I am often pleasantly surprised with the connections I find through tags.
Generally, someone has applied a tag to a link I wouldn’t have, so I get to see how they made that connection – and often my world gets a bit wider as a result. Or I locate individuals with tag lists that are intriguingly similar to or different from mine, and I use this as a way to start exploring their world.
So I guess, in short:
- Folksonomies enhance exploration.
- Taxonomies enhance searching.
…That’s how I look at it, anyway.
I wrote more about folksonomies here.
Best,
- Amy Gahran
Editor, CONTENTIOUS
Amy –I keep playing with the idea that “Folksonomies enhance exploration. Taxonomies enhance searching.” Folksonomies, to me, provide the flexibility and adaptation of the many ways people approach retrieving information — “people who browse/explore (unstructured)â€? vs. “people who find/focus (structured).â€?
I love the way, Adam Mathes puts it in his “Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata� article (http://www.adammathes.com/academic/computer-mediated-communication/folksonomies.html). “Desire lines are the foot-worn paths that sometimes appear in a landscape over time. …Let wanderers create paths through use, and then pave the emerging walkways, ensuring optimal utitlity.�
To me, that is how both folksonomies and taxonomies evolve and influence enhanced exploration as well as searching. Creating grassroot paths, vocabularies, and common information maps – ultimately organically evolve from folksonomy to influence more structured taxonomy classifications. Circle of the metadata lifecycle, I would say!
Good stuff. Thanks!
I venture to guess that the best approach would be to google the tag wording and see what phrase gets the most, or best, results.
Just my gut reaction. David brings up a good point, I love his contrarian viewpoint, similar to mine in some respects. I question everything, even things it seems almost nobody else questions, like RSS, IntelliTXT, sleazy sponsored links (see New Media Musings blog), excessive inclusion of sensitive personal details in blogs, etc.