This is something the ‘well-designed metadata’ crowd has never understood — just because it’s better to have well-designed metadata along one axis does not mean that it is better along all axes, and the axis of cost, in particular, will trump any other advantage as it grows larger. And the cost of tagging large systems rigorously is crippling, so fantasies of using controlled metadata in environments like Flickr are really fantasies of users suddenly deciding to become disciples of information architecture.
Don't know what a folksonomy is? It's basically a word for user-driven categorisation such as that used at Flickr. If you look at the 'tags' section of Flickr you will see a group of words used by people using the system to describe the photos they upload. The size of the word corresponds to the popularity of the tag, how many photos are called that, basically. So, the bigger the word, the more photos.
Hopefully more discussion on user-driver categorisation next week.
Comments
Keep it coming...
Posted by: RyGuy | January 9, 2005 11:01 AM