Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification
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Transcript of Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification
Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification
Michael E. [email protected]@ryaninteractive
UPA Boston User Experience Conference 2009
2Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification
About Me
3Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification
Where do you put this book in a taxonomy?
(Takahashi, 2009)
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Oreilly Media – Math?
(O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2009)
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Amazon’s classification
What terms describe this book?
(Amazon.com, 2009)
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What terms describe this book?
Tags Amazon users have attached to this book
(Amazon.com, 2009)
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What is a Folksonomy?
The term “folksonomy” was created by Thomas Vander Wal on
a listserve in July 2004. Term combines folk and taxonomy.
“Folksonomy is the result of personal free tagging of information and objects… for one's own retrieval… The value in this external tagging is derived from people using their own vocabulary and adding explicit meaning, which may come from inferred understanding of the information/object”
(Vander Wal, 2007b)
8Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification
Tagging Model
Tagger > Tag > Object
9Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification
Aggregation
• Tags are compiled in aggregation
• Finds most popular tags for an object
• Connects tags to multiple objects
• Finds most popular tags on a website
• Connects tags and objects by inference
Usability
Human Factors
UX
(Smith, 2008)
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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification
Pivot browsing
(Amazon.com, 2009)
(Rosenfeld & Morville, 2007)
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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification
Search and Filter
Users can add or subtract tags to filter results
(Amazon.com, 2009)
(Golder & Huberman, 2005)
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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification
Tag counts to rank popularity
Number of people who tagged
(Delicious, 2009)
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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification
Tag cloud
(Flickr, 2009)
(Rainie, 2007)
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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification
Exercise
Assign tags (keywords) to these objects. These could be for everyone or just for you.
(Amazon.com, 2009)
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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification
Amazon’s tags
(Amazon.com, 2009)
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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification
How do people tag?
Individual and Social retrieval
• Literal descriptive
• Personal abstract
• Personal categorization
• Social benefit
(Golder & Huberman, 2005)
(Vander Wal, 2007a)
(Smith, 2008)
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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification
Who is tagging?
2007 PEW Internet & American Life Project survey
• 28% of Americans (42 million) online have tagged
• 7% (10 million) tag daily.
• Americans who tag tend to be under 40 and have a higher education and income.
• Race/ethnicity of the taggers was reported as:– 26% White, non-Hispanic
– 36% Black, non-Hispanic
– 33% English-speaking Hispanic
(Rainie, 2007)
(Vander Wal, 2007a)
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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification
How businesses can use tagging
• Validate or identify gaps in a taxonomy
• Additional metadata enhances findability
• Encourage tagging by making it easy, fun & social
(Trant, 2006)
(Smith, 2008)
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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification
Problems with tagging
Messy metadata
• User-controlled vocabulary can help
• 2006 Trant study only needed to remove 6.7% of terms
• Problem decreases as tag usage grows
(Trant, 2006)
(Smith, 2008)
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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification
Tag abuse
• Give taggers as much freedom as possible to encourage use, but need to protect users from abuse
– Remove/disable expletives and hate speech
– Allow users to flag tags and taggers
• Spam
• Vocal Minority
• Negative Tagging
(Smith, 2008)
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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification
Negative Tagging
Expect some negative tags for objects. Best to allow this as long as it is not abusive to users.
(Amazon.com, 2009)
(Smith, 2008)
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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification
For more info
Gene Smith - Tagging: People-powered metadata for the social web (voices that matter)
www.personalinfocloud.com Thomas Vander Wal’s Blog
[email protected]@ryaninteractive
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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification
Other Manga Guides
(No Starch Press, 2009)
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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification
Thank You
Questions?
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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification
Appendix A: References• Amazon.com. (2009). http://www.amazon.com
• Delicious. (2009). http://www.delicious.com/
• Flickr. (2009). http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/
• Golder, S. & Huberman, B. A. (2005) The structure of collaborative tagging systems. Technical report, In-formation Dynamics Lab, HP Labs. http://arxiv.org/ftp/cs/papers/0508/0508082.pdf
• No Starch Press (2009) http://nostarch.com/manga/
• O'Reilly Media, Inc. (2009). http://oreilly.com/pub/topic/math
• Rainie, L. (2007). 28% of online Americans have used the Internet to tag content. http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Tagging.pdf
• Rosenfeld, L., & Morville, P. (2007). Information architecture for the World Wide Web (3rd ed.). Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly.
• Smith, G. (2008). Tagging: People-powered metadata for the social web (voices that matter) Berkeley, CA: New Riders.
• Takahashi, S. (2009). The manga guide to statistics. San Francisco: No Starch Press.
• Trant, J. (2006). Social classification and folksonomy in art museums: Early data from the steve.museum tagger prototype. In Proceedings of the 17th SIG Classification Research Workshop, 2006. http://www.archimuse.com/papers/asist-CR-steve-0611.pdf
• Vander Wal, T. (2007a, January 31). Pew research on tagging. Personal InfoCloud. http://www.personalinfocloud.com/2007/01/pew_research_on.html
• Vander Wal, T. (2007b, February 2). Folksonomy coinage and definition. Off the Top. http://vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html