templatedata

I've mentioned folksonomies a couple of times now, here's a service that enables you to share and store and organise academic papers you are reading. It uses tags similar to those at Flickr and del.icio.us. It's called Citeulike.

--------

An interesting post about the benefits, or lack of, in 'proper' categorisation and the use of folksonomies.

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.

Yes, it's been put in the too-hard basket for a while but at some stage it comes back to bite you. It is being addressed, quite well from what I hear, at the University in relation to the CMS and the management of online content in general, so this is a good start. To Metadata or not to Metadata looks at the basic issues and how groups and software vendors are tackling the problem.

A couple of things have become increasingly clear: Metadata is not going away and there is no one simple solution to how to add metadata and maximize its value. Consequently, what we are going to do in this article is take a look at some of the basic issues around adding metadata to unstructured content and explore a range of approaches that various groups and software vendors are trying. We will then examine how a broader view of metadata, beyond simply adding keywords to documents, is leading to a more sophisticated, multi-dimensional or infrastructure-based approach to metadata that supports a smarter balance of both more and less metadata.

--------