Folksonomy, social tagging, del.icio.us, flickr

[Joshua Thorp]

Hi All,

This is a link to an interesting article on the down side of "social  
tagging" or "folksonomy" as some are referring to meta-data web posting  
sites.  This follows in a string of posts I have been making.  If  
uninterested in them you will probably remain uninterested.  There is a  
bit of reading in the article but I found it interesting so I am  
sharing.

The author describes a game called the ESP game,  
http://www.espgame.org/ , developed by CMU researchers to find labels  
for images.  His discription of the tagging of lowest common  
denominator is very interesting.  To me it seems valuable in that it  
provides the start of a system to label images.  That the structure of  
the game favors certain lowest,  quickest,  most facile discriptions  
suggests to me that the structure of the game should be looked at and  
perhaps augmented.

Taking a group of images without any discription and giving them a set  
of discriptors is valuable.  Taking those discriptors to the next level  
would also be valuable.  The idea that any one system should be end all  
and be all seems to me wrong headed.  So the idea that social tagging  
should get you all the way there isn't quite right.  It would seem to  
me that a better view on this would be how do you include the raw power  
of the common man with the discriminating taste of the elite (if you  
read the article you will note the author takes umbrage at the  
discrimination of the common man...i.e. racism) to create more meaning  
than either group alone can create.  How elite status is conveyed upon  
one person and not another is another interesting topic that this  
brings up...

Anyway for those interested:

the article:
http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/01/20/ 
social_consequences_of_social_tagging.php

the nut of the article:

"""
...

Unfortunately, too many of the paeans to tagging that I?ve read have  
completely ignored some of the key social and cultural issues  
associated with public and collaborative labeling of content, opting  
instead for a level of technology-driven optimism that I see as overly  
naive. I think folksonomy has incredible value?the two web sites that I  
use most heavily right now are Flickr and del.icio.us. And I understand  
that this is something that can?t be stuffed back into the bottle.  
Nonetheless, I don?t think that means we have to accept it with an  
uncritical eye, or adopt every new implementation of tagging without  
consideration.

...

One of the topics that?s started coming in these discussions is the  
extent to which any given individual?s tagging behavior is (or can be,  
or should be, or shouldn?t be) influenced by the tags others have  
assigned. In a recent post on the delicious-discuss mailing list, Saul  
Albert wrote:

 >>>    So I?m proposing a kind of tag-brokerage system. A system by  
which people can form epistomology gangs who decide to share tags, and  
declare a concensually [sic] decided-upon meaning and remit for them.  
That?s when tags can start to become categories, grouped, separated,  
weeded, updated, expanded etc..

I?ve been mulling that over for a bit. On the one hand, as a librarian,  
I understand completely the value of controlled vocabularies and  
taxonomies. I don?t want to have to look in six different places for  
information on a given topic?I want some level of confidence that the  
things I want are grouped together. On the other hand, I don?t share  
the optimism that so many of my colleagues in this field seem to have  
that the collective ?wisdom of crowds? will always yield accurate and  
useful descriptors. Describing things well is hard, and often  
context-specific.

...

Clay argues that detractors from wikipedia and folksonomy are ignoring  
the compelling economic argument in favor of their widespread use and  
adoption. Perhaps. But I?m arguing that it?s just as problematic to  
ignore the compelling social, cultural, and academic arguments against  
lowest-common-denominator classification. I don?t want to toss out  
folksonomies. But I also don?t want to toss out controlled  
vocabularies, or expert assignment of categories. I just don?t believe  
that all expertise can be replicated through repeated and amplified  
non-expert input.

"""