Companies like Boeing spend years developing controlled vocabularies to drive ambiguity out of their technical documentation. For example, tech writers might be told to use the word “turn” but not “twist” when describing any circular motion involving a tool. And, at Corbis, the home of millions of digital images, the in-house cataloguers might be told to use the word “shore” and not “beach” when describing coastal photos.

But no one is in a position to write a controlled vocabulary for the Internet, And if they were, you can be sure that many of us would be twisting the night away on the beach, just to break the rules.

This is the promise and the risk of folksonomies. Folksonomies arise when people are tagging objects (Web pages, photos, etc.) in public. If you want something to be found by others, you’ll choose the most popular tag. That adds yet more momentum to that tag. And before you know it, most people tag posts about PC Forum as “pcforum05,” not “pcf”, “pcf05” or “Esther’s thang.” Folksonomies are bottom-up controlled vocabularies.

For not very good reasons, the word “controlled” raises a red flag for me. Here’s my mental back-and-forth on the issue:

Back: A folksonomy is not centrally controlled, which is good because a vocabulary dictator would not only frequently get it wrong, but would silently enforce her interpretation. Word choice is too important to be left to the tyrants. In fact, the first thing tyrants do is try to control our word choices.

Forth: But a folksonomy is nonetheless controlled by a majority. Do folksonomies replace the central vocabulary dictator with an emergent dictator? The word choices are likely to be more in tune with majority thinking, but the conformism of the hippies was as bad as the conformism of the suits.

Back: This is simply how language works. Words and meanings arise from a type of “conformism,” but so what? Meaning itself is a type of conformism, you aging hippie douchebag!

Forth: But, language changes through implicit evocations of meaning. There is no word dictator who declares “Thou shalt now replace the word ‘idea’ with ‘meme.'” Nope, we hear the word, get a sense from context or from a bumbling, hand-waving definition from someone at a party, and we appropriate it. After a while, a dictionary notices and attempts to freeze and formalize the definition. Yet, tags are explicit. They take something as rich in meaning as a family photo and reduce it to a single word. That’s a diminishment.

Back: Big freaking deal. Categorization diminishes. Everyone knows that. It’s why we categorize: It reduces complexity to something manageable at least for the moment. But often categorization diminishes so that things in their richness can be found: Menus in restaurants categorize food so you can taste it in all its glory. And if people feel that the popular tags are not categorizing objects the way they want, they can build local folksonomies, using the tags accepted by their social group.

Forth: Not in the commercial world. Steve Papa at Endeca at the PCForum open discussion a few days ago pointed to eBay as an example: There are economic reasons to describe your items for sale using the most popular language. E.g., call it a “notebook,” not a “laptop.” Likewise, where there are economic or other reasons for people to use the popular tags, some folksonomies will dominate. This will undoubtedly drive some ambiguity out of our everyday language. For example, someone pointed out to me recently that CNN started out calling the tsunami a “tidal wave,” but switched when everyone else was calling it a “tsunami.” That sort of thing will happen faster and more regularly as folksonomies grow in more and more fields.

Back: Big deal. Tsunami = tidal wave. And because CNN switched, now we can find its stories when we search for “tsunami.”

Forth: No two words are every exactly the same. And clarity leads to division. Imagine that a site like NYTimes.com allows us to tag their posts in a del.icio.us sort of way. (We can do that already at del.icio.us, of course, but doing it on the Times site would be different.) There will be tag wars over whether to tag articles as “tax relief” or “wealthy welfare.” Communities will form around semantics, making George Lakoff happy, but further driving us apart.

Back: So the only thing that lets us live together is the ambiguity of our language? If we ever really understood each other, we’d kill each other?

Forth: Well, ambiguity sure helps. What would we do without those gray zones?

Me: Folksonomies will influence how we use words outside of the tagging environment. It will sometimes replace the subtle, organic ways in which language evolves with the crudity endemic to explicitness. Groups will form around words, and words will form around groups, as always. We and our language will survive. [Technorati tags: taxonomy folksonomy tags]

Categories: Uncategorized dw