Tagging Part 3 - Philosphy

As tag clouds come to replace expert taxonomies in common practice, carefully constructed hierarchies vanish. In their place is a flattened world where every idea, at any level, is a topic as worthy as any other. Eight Mile is a topic at the same level as Detroit, which is a topic at the same level as Cities, which is a topic at the same level as United States, and so on.

http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0505a.shtml
Jeffrey Zeldman
May 5th, 2005

The relative importance of various tags was initially defined purely through frequency of use and denoted in tag clouds by size -- more use equated to a larger font size within the cloud. Less frequency of use was denoted by ever decreasing font sizes, thus the fear that important topics could disappear from the blogosphere or at least that their tags would get so small that only folks with magnifying glasses would see them.

One influential blogger may mention another blog in their post. That mention might cause several thousand other bloggers to go to the post and tag it. That in turn might cause several million more bloggers to tag the post for future reading and..... a new star is born. Interest in topics could explode, or appear to explode, but then wane equally quickly.

The second issue mentioned regularly with respect to tagging is navigation.

Folksonomy (also known as collaborative tagging , social classification, social indexing, social tagging, and other names) is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. In contrast to traditional subject indexing, metadata is not only generated by experts but also by creators and consumers of the content. Usually, freely chosen keywords are used instead of a controlled vocabulary.[1] Folksonomies became popular on the Web around 2004 with social software applications such as social bookmarking or annotating photographs. Websites that support tagging and the principle of folksonomy are referred to in the context of Web 2.0 because participation is very easy and tagging data is used in new ways to find information. For example, tag clouds are frequently used to visualize the most used tags of a folksonomy. The term folksonomy is also used to denote only the set of tags that are created in social tagging.

Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy
Nov. 26, 2007

Flickr is already beginning to solve this problem by applying more traditional hierarchies to their newest search tools, primarily the world map now available on their website. This isn't a perfect solution as it still depends on user generated tags, but it does make searching for pictures of a specific geographic area much more quickly.

The graphic above is from Flickr this morning -- 2.2 million photos geotagged this month. Below is a video about a use for all of those geographically tagged photos, a software called Seadragon.



Photosynth takes navigation to a new level.

Lisa