Archive for the ‘Folksononmy’ Category

First Monday has published an article written by Alexis Wichowski titled Survival of the fittest tag: Folksonomies, findability, and the evolution of information organization in its May 4th issue.

“Folksonomies have emerged as a means to create order in a rapidly expanding information environment whose existing means to organize content have been strained. This paper examines folksonomies from an evolutionary perspective, viewing the changing conditions of the information environment as having given rise to organization adaptations in order to ensure information “survival”— remaining findable. This essay traces historical information organization mechanisms, the conditions that gave rise to folksonomies, and the scholarly response, review, and recommendations for the future of folksonomies.”

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The social book cataloging app, LibraryThing released an interesting feature this summer called the tagmash. It allows users to conduct a search for multiple tags and have the website mash them together with all their variant tags, providing for a comprehensive search of the collection.

In anticipation of Halloween next month, I tried out a search for some scary reads. Here’s my tagmash for the search query : fiction, horror, vampires, -anne rice. LibraryThing has aggregated all of the variant ways which users have spelled and cataloged their books with the terms fiction including with capitalization and possible misspellings. It did the same for the other tags, including “genre: horror” within my mash as well as the singular “vampire”.

I got back the top 250 books which are relevant to my search, as well as related tags to search, and additionally a list of related tagmashes, and related subjects. To try out your own tagmash, you can search by tag on the main search page.

Folksonomy has become an important part of information sharing structures via the web - formal and informal. Folksonomy is the “vocabulary” or collection of tags that results from personal free tagging of web resources for one’s own use and the aggregate collection of tags that results from a group tagging project. Tagging systems are possible only if people are motivated to do more of the work themselves, for individual and/or social reasons. They are necessarily sloppy systems, but for an inexpensive, easy way of using the wisdom of the crowd to make resources visible and sortable, there’s nothing like tags.

Tagging for Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing explores these issues and shows the power of tagging to encourage conversations.

Coming up with the perfect tag is the problem- or is it? Subject analysis does not come naturally to the folksonomy crowd. Tags and the Power of Suggestion is a light-hearted consideration of some of the underlying influences of ‘natural’ approaches to organisation.

If you just want to delve further into tagging, then The Tagging Toolbox: 30+ Tagging Tools might be just what your are after:

Tags - for some, one of the best ideas on the web, for others, merely a visual distraction. Yes, we’re talking about those loosely defined categories which are usually organized into cute little clouds. Looking for tag-related resources can be tough, so we’ve dug up 30 tools and resources that every seasoned tagger should check out.