AKMA has discovered that all the “pippa” tags Technorati knows about have to do with the Pippa he knows about. He adds, jokingly: “…you other Pippas of the world, sorry, you’ll have to devise modifiers for your own tags.” Ah, the privileges of the rarely named!

Of course, we’re all going to be devising modifiers if tagging takes off, or our computers will add them behind our backs: “Hmm, do you think David Weinberger wants to see all the photos of that new, heavily-marketed soft drink, Pippa!, or is it more likely that, because he’s friends with AKMA, he really wants to see that darling Pippa’s tags?”

(By the way, don’t miss the sight of AKMA thinking he’s “boasting.” He doesn’t even know what boasting is about.)

[Technorati tags: taxonomy pippa akma tags]

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Consumerpedia

Consumerpedia is Wikipedia for products. It’s in .00000001 alpha, the site says, but it seems usable, albeit empty. (I put in a review of Thinkpad X40, just to try it out.) The Help page highlights its tools for constructing a hierchical folksonomy: Anyone can create a category, a sub-category, a re-direct (= synonymn), or a related-to (= reciprocal link). It explicitly has avoided creating a top-down categorization scheme.Who’s up for a Consumerpedia vs United Nations Standard Products and Services Code System (UNSPSC) Deathmatch!

How is it different from ePinions? From the About page:

Consumerpedia came out of a desire to have a user-driven consumer resource that evolved based on how people actually used it – where they were not forced into certain narrow categories and topics as an appendage of someone’s ecommerce effort, but rather a completely independent information resource that was an end in itself – one that had no conflict of interest and with the sole goal of simply making it easier to find and share helpful information

I don’t yet see how it accommodates multiple points of view, as the About page promises, but I’m sure that’ll be clear once someone posts a multiple point of view. [Technorati tags: taxonomy consumerpedia wikipedia]

Consumerpedia has posted a helpful response and explanation on their blog. To clarify: It’s for anything reviewable, not just products. And I didn’t mean to imply that it’s a wiki.

It’ll be crucial to see how they implement their karma system. And, I’m still unclear about the basic question of how it handles multiple reviews of a single item.

I hope it’s wildly successful.

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Gene Smith has posted a helpful diagram from his IA Summit Panel presentation:

Click to see full size

You get folksonomies when people are tagging stuff — whether it’s their own or other’s — in public.

Thomas Vander Wal, who coined the term “folksonomy,” I think would label the X axis [Mnemonic: X is a-cross] differently. In his post on broad and narrow folksonomies, he defines a broad folksonomy as one that “has many people tagging the same object and every person can tag the object with their own tags” (= del.icio.us). A narrow taxonomy has fewer people tagging and there is only one of each tag applied (= flickr).

The latter clause is the important one. At del.icio.us, 100 people could upload the same bookmark (= URL) and tag it. At flickr, generally only the person who took a photo is going to upload it, and even if two people upload the identical photo, flickr counts them as a separate. So, at del.icio.us, if 50 people have tagged a bookmark as “SF,” you may nevertheless decide to become the 51st, because that’s how you want to remember that URL. That there are now 51 “SF” tags is important information that could be used to create a folksonomy. At flickr, if you come across a photo of the Golden Gate bridge that is already tagged “SF,” and that’s how you want to remember it, you won’t add a “SF” tag because the photo already has that tag. Thus, flickr doesn’t know how many people find the “SF” tag useful for any particular photo. (Flickr can know that overall at flickr there are lots more “SF” tags than “San Francisco” tags; the folksonomy happens one level up.)

So, if I understand Thomas, a broad taxonomy is really one in which an object can have multiple instances of the same tag, whereas in a narrow taxonomy, an object can only have one instance of each tag.

I wrote to Thomas and asked him how he would jigger Gene’s diagram, and he replied:

I think the X-axis should be tagging for one’s self (right) and tagging for others (left), which would make the pure folksonomy quadrant the upper right. This would move GMail to the lower right with Furl above it and a little left. I think Technorati Tags would move ever so slightly right.

Or we could replace the X axis with Narrow to Broad folksonomy, which would move flickr to the left and del.icio.us to the right. So, now all we need is a n-dimensional matrix to accommodate all these damn quadrants. Plus, I need a brain that understands spatial relationships.

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]

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Ten by Ten lets you browse the top stories via thumbnails. [Technorati tags: taxonomy tags]

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Thanks to Peter Morville, here are links to info about the panel on folksonomies at the IA Summit:

PDF’s of the panelists’ slides by Gene Smith Peter Morville, Peter Herholz and Thomas Vander Wal

Seb Paquet’s notes on the presentations

An MP3 of Peter Morville on “sorting out social classification” which we’re warned crashes Firefox but works on IE.

I’m really sorry I missed attending the Summit. It sounds fascinating: The leading thinkers and what a great time to be talking about these issues.

[Technorati tags: taxonomy folksonomy iasummit]

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As we sort through tags, it’d often be useful to know who created a particular tag. And when. And in which application. And probably other stuff also. While some apps remember who created which tag (e.g., Flickr), as we begin to aggregate tags, we could use a standard way to express this tagging metadata…a Dublin Core not for objects but for tags attached to objects.

If this were to happen, it’s very likely to come from the apps that benefit from having standardized tag metadata. The most obvious suspects are the search engines. (Hmm. I may be re-having Mary Hodder‘s idea.) [Technorati tags: tags taxonomy]

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Bob Filipczak was browsing AdCritic.ccom and came across a couple of commercials for a body spray for men called Tag. I don’t subscribe to AdCritic ($100/yr), but here’s the stub of an article from AdWeek:

* The budget was not disclosed, but sources said initial ad spending would be at least $50 million.

* The campaign employs broad humor and sexual innuendo in an effort to appeal to teens and young adult males, the key target market for the product.

* Commercial scenarios include advances from the mother of a prospective date and reactions to the product’s scent in public venues including a drugstore and a sports arena.

AdWeek also requires a subscription. As does Marketing magazine. Jeez, these marketing folks make it hard to get any stinking information about products!

At least Time lets you read an article about it.

Anyway, Bob suggests a tag line:

Tag: Makes Geeks Tolerable.

Bogus Contest: Tag lines for Tag.

My contribution:

Tag: Removes the Stink of Hierarchy…From Your Bottom Up

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CitULike is del.icio.us for academics. It saves citation details and exports them in a couple of standard formats. It aggregates journal articles for your posting pleasure. It encourages long-ish descriptions and lets you assign stars. Nice!

(Thanks to Lisa Williams for pointing to a posting in WeblogToolsCollection about it.)

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This site draws the relationships among tags at del.icio.us. (Thanks to Henrik Schneider for the link.)

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