Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

folksonomy

I’ve been intrigued of late by the concept of “tagging.” It’s a deceptively simple idea: Organizing content — writing, photos, links and the like — by keyword. (I’m not keen on the working term for it, “folksonomy,” because I don’t find it as descriptive as the more colloquial “tagging.” I actually like “semantic web,” but that phrase describes something entirely different.)

Perhaps the most powerful part of the concept: Through community Web sites that employ tagging, the concept can be used to sort and search through not only your own content, but everyone else’s as well. At bookmark site del.icio.us, tags are used to categorize Internet links. At Flickr, it’s photos; Technorati, blog posts. It’s a fascinating way to get a handle on the amorphous “blogosphere” and explore what people are seeing and thinking; for example, run a search on the tag “live8” on Technorati or Flickr to read written accounts or photographs from this weekend’s Live 8 concert series.

Whether they realize it or not, these postings are part of a larger conversation. Even if all these bloggers aren’t reading or responding to everyone else’s posts, the fact that so many people are talking about the same thing at the same time at the very least demonstrates that, at this moment, that topic has struck a resonant chord within a mass audience.

I describe tagging as “deceptively simple” because formulating a consistent set of keywords to use to categorize (and later query) content can be a difficult thing — particularly when you’re talking about thousands of users who may apply completely different keywords to the same topic. For one, there’s multiple permutations of the same word to contend with — i.e. “blog,” “blogs,” “blogging,” “blogger.” Or synonyms — “web” vs. “internet,” for example. A search engine is only as good as the metadata it has at its disposal, and if tags are inconsistently applied — or the search engine isn’t smart enough to consider alternate tags — then the search engine’s utility is markedly diminished. And it’s a challenge at best to enforce (or at least encourage) some kind of tagging consistency among such a large user population.

Del.icio.us has an interesting approach to the problem: When you bookmark a link that other users also have bookmarked, the system will prompt you with “recommended” and “popular” keywords that you and other users have used to describe that link and others like it. It’s certainly not perfect, but it’s a start.

I’ve forsaken my normal bookmarking system and jumped on the del.icio.us bandwagon in the hope that it’s a more effective way of organizing my morass of links and maybe curbing my tendency to keep dozens of tabs open in Safari and Firefox (a practice that just begs for a crash). A side benefit is that I’ll be able to access my bookmarked links from anywhere, since they’re right there on the Internet. I do wish, however, that there was a way to keep a subset of links private. I don’t mind sharing my bookmarks, but I don’t necessarily want to share everything.

I’ve also added Technorati tags to my blog entries, thanks to a handy Movable Type plugin by George Hotelling that uses the keywords field to generate links to other people’s blog entries that have been similarly tagged.

It’s a work in progress, and far from finished or perfect, but it’ll be interesting to see where all this leads, both personally and in the larger Internet sphere.