Om flickr och del.icio.us, men mest om metadata

Postat: 2004-12-09 kl. 10.53

Conventional wisdom holds that people will never assign metadata tags to content. It just isn’t on the path of least resistance, the story goes, and those few who do step off the path succeed only in creating unwieldy taxonomies [Google: The science of naming and classifying organisms]. /.../ Yet somehow, users of Flickr and del.icio.us do routinely tag content, and those tags open new dimensions of navigation and search. It’s worth pondering how and why this works.

Abandoning taxonomy is the first ingredient of success. These systems just use bags of keywords that draw from — and extend — a flat namespace. In other words, you tag an item with a list of existing and/or new keywords. Of course, that idea’s been around for decades, so what’s special about Flickr and del.icio.us? Sometimes a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind. The degree to which these systems bind the assignment of tags to their use — in a tight feedback loop — is that kind of difference.

(InfoWorld: Collaborative knowledge gardening)

Värt att tänka på och komma ihåg för kollaborativa databaser i framtiden. Semi-wiki-byggen och sånt. Eller hur BH?

Uppdatering:

Erik kommenterar med artikeltips.

Clearly, such tagging systems are not a panacea; they present many potential drawbacks. With no one controlling the vocabulary, users develop multiple terms for identical concepts. For example, if you want to find all references to New York City on Del.icio.us, you’ll have to look through “nyc,” “newyork,” and “newyorkcity.”

/.../

Use the tags to understand how people consider the content at hand. Then you can “pave” the best paths to ensure findability — say, by explicitly linking “nyc,” “newyork,” and “newyorkcity.” You can also align these tags with more formal schemes, thus enhancing the utility of both. Tools like the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Online could be used to make explicit relationships between “nyc,” “manhattan,” and “harlem.”

(Adaptive Path: Metadata for the Masses)