Ben Hyde looks at four popular bookmarks at del.icio.us and plots how many times each is tagged with the same word. E.g, BoingBoing is tagged as “blog” 200 times and as “news” 90 times. The curve is that of a classic power law: The most frequently used tags are used waaaay more frequently than lesser-used tags.

Ben stresses that four bookmarks don’t constitute a significant sample, but wouldn’t we expect a folksonomy to assume the shape of a power law distribution? [Technorati tags: tags taxonomy]

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ProgeSOFT is encouraging its users to tag content about its products (IntelliCAD, PRogeCAD) so they can learn from one another. It’s recommending three tags — intellicad, learnintellicad, and “learn software” — for use at del.icio.us, flickr and blog sites via technorati tags.

Great experiment, although I’m not convinced that those are the right tags, especially the “learn software” one. Is that so you can search for items tagged both as “intellicad” and “learn software”? It’ll be interesting to see how the folks develop their own folksonomy.

I don’t mean to carp. I think this is a truly interesting idea. My hat is off to ProfeSOFT.

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Check the tag “10placesofmycity” at Technorati. People from around the world are tagging URLS, posts and photos showing off where they live. Technorati is automatically assembling them into a mini city pride portal. Cool! [Technorati tag: taxonomy] [Disclosure: I’m on technorati’s board of advisors.]

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Matt Biddulf has an animated screen capture of what del.icio.us would look like embedded in the BBC 3’s page. It’s an eye-popper all right: So elegant it seems obvious. Brilliant. (Thanks to The Obvious for the link.) [Technorati tag: taxonomy]

danah responds to Clay’s enthusiasm (which I generally share) for tags.

There’s a problematic feature to crowds – they like to homogenize…

Folksonomy isn’t asking the questions about the implications of collective action classification. Who benefits? Who becomes marginalized? What priorities bubble up? How does pressure to homogenize affect the schema and the people involved? How are some people hurt or offended by decisions that are made? Should moderation of classifications occur? If so, what are the consequences?

These are great questions, and leave it to danah to ask them! We’ll address them as they occur…but only if (as danah suggests) we keep raising them. Otherwise, we’d have to design a system ahead of time that we would undoubtedly get wrong.

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[This is the conclusion of the article on tagging I published a few days ago in my newsletter.]

You label a jar of preserves “Strawberry – Aug. 2005” so you can tell what’s in it and whether the green stuff on top is supposed to be there. At Flickr, you tag a digital photo of your jar of preserves “strawberry jam” so other people can find it. The label has a context: the thing that it’s attached to. The tag’s context is invisible and detached: It’s how you think other people are going to search for it. (As Joshua Schachter, creator of del.icio.us, says, tagging is the inverse of searching.)

So, we’re creating this context-free realm of free-floating metadata, like word magnets on a refrigerator door, that we will paw through and assemble, and, most important, do things we haven’t yet thought of.

The fact that we are inventing this way of classifying is important. It announces that we are skeptical at a whole new level: Not just about the content of knowledge but about how it’s divvied up in the first place.

This explicitly pries yet another layer off the real and pulls it into the human, for in a tagged world, it’s hard to maintain that topics exist independent of us. Or disciplines. Instead, we cluster our world around our interests. New interest? Shuffle and deal again.

The project of knowledge goes from filling up containers with information to making everything public by tagging it and throwing it into the leaf pile. We’re doing that together, without waiting for a plan or permission. Then we’re rolling around in the leaves.

This is a knowledge economy of wild excess. It would make no sense if we were still scratching for information under rocks.

We are meaning our world together. We can’t do it if we have to do it perfectly or even well. It’s better just to do it.

We can sort it out later. [Technorati tag: taxonomy]

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In response to AKMA’s confession, Dave writes about feeling guilty about not using categories: When he failed to use them a few times, he felt so guilty about it that he stopped using them entirely.

Best of all, now those of us who do use tags can engage in Taggenfreude. (Sign of a meme catching on: Bad bad puns. Why? Because they’re as easy as falling off a blog.)

Jay at iCite has some trenchant comments on the article on tagging in the new issue of my newsletter. (I’ve replied in a comment.)

Dan Bricklin reflects on this and decides that software needs to take guiltlessness as a desideratum.

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Burningbird pulls together a whole bunch of excellent posts about tags, and marshalls them into a discussion dead center on the main point:

I believe that ultimately interest in folksonomies will go the way of most memes, in that they’re fun to play with, but eventually we want something that won’t splinter, crack, and stumble the very first day it’s released.

…no matter how many tricks you play with something like tags, you can only pull out as much ‘meaning’ as you put into them.

…the semantic web is going to be built ‘by the people’, but it won’t be built on chaos. In other words, 100 monkeys typing long enough will NOT write Shakespeare; nor will a 100 million people randomly forming associations create the semantic web.

(This snippet doesn’t do justice to the piece. It’s a must-read.)

Shelley understands this stuff better than I do, but I’m not convinced she’s right. My initial concern about the hype is whether we’re going to get more apps that get us tagging. If we don’t, then tags won’t have much effect. If we do, then I simply don’t know whether we’re going to be able to solve the problems inherent in scaling tags: Tags work because they’re so simple and because they are so connected to the human semantic context, but having billions of tags won’t work because they’re so simple and connected to the human semantic context. Will we be able to triangulate tags with other data – especially social data – so that we can get more out of them than we put in? It doesn’t seem impossible to me – simply knowing who created a tag lets you get more out of the tag than the person put in – but it’s not up to me to invent the stuff.

So, I think you can get more out of a tag than someone put in. But I don’t know how and I don’t know if we will.

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It’s not that we need more proof of the point, but James Carroll, columnist for the Boston Globe, today gives a particularly good example of the politics of categorization. He writes that the first New York Times story about Auschwitz, on May 8, 1945, is surprisingly detailed and blunt about what happened in the death camp where 2 million people were murdered. There’s only one major omission: “…in defining the identities of those victims, the story never used the word ‘Jew.'” He adds:

The New York Times index did not cite stories about concentration camps under the category “Jews” until 1950. It was not until 1975 that the index category “Nazi Policies Toward Jews” appeared.

By the way, the Times story was written by C. L. Sulzberger and appeared on page 12.

Technorati tag: taxonomy

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Technorati, a site that indexes 4.5 million weblogs, is now enabling us to sort blog posts by tag. This is way way cool. In fact, it marks a next step in the rapid evolution of the tagging economy. [Disclosure: I am on Technorati’s Board of Advisors. But I would have been excited about this anyway.]

The tags come from three sources. First, if you’ve uploaded a photo to Flickr and have tagged it (or if one of your pals has tagged it), it will show up under that tag at technorati. Second, if you’ve bookmarked a page using del.icio.us, it will show up under that tag at technorati. Third, if your blogging software supports categories, your blog posts will show up under the categories you’ve assigned; categories are now tags in the eyes of Technorati.

Even if your blogging software doesn’t know from categories, you can still tag a post with, say, “weasels” by inserting into it the following line:

It’s easy to imagine this becoming a standard part of the footer of blog entries.

Take a look at this page to see how Technorati aggregates all the blogs, flickr photos and del.icio.us bookmarks tagged as “humor.” This page shows the top 100 or so (I didn’t count) tags in alphabetical order, with font size representing the number of tagged items.

This is exciting to me not only because it’s useful but because it marks a needed advance in how we get value from tags. Thanks to del.icio.us and then flickr in particular, hundreds of thousands of people have been introduced to bottom-up tagging: Just slap a tag on something and now its value becomes social, not individual. As these tags are added willy-nilly, two issues arise: We want to get more value from them and we want to work out the scaling problems — it’s one thing when there are 30 things tagged with “weasels” and another when there are 300,000. A site like technorati, which already gets its value as an aggregator, is in a good position to innovate around both issues.

Now for some observations and guesses.

First, categories are not tags. I’m guessing that the average number of categories used by any single blogger is in the 3-15 range. Many of us want to keep our categories broad because they are intended to help a reader see all of our posts, and we want to be inclusive rather than fine-grained. If that’s the case, then tags commonly used by categories are not going to be very useful when aggregated by Technorati. Actually, they might be useful to researchers but not very useful to casual readers. That’s not a criticism; I’m glad Technorati is treating categories as tags. But I suspect that the hand-tagged tags are going to turn out to be more useful because we’ll hand-tag them with their aggregation by Technorati in mind. (Bogus Contest: How many hours before some posts a bookmarklet to ease the hand-tagging of multiple tags?)

Second, it will be fascinating to watch the social effects as people adjust their tag sets in order to get aggregated either into the most popular tags or to be segmented into smaller groupings. That is, if you want to be found when people are searching for blogs about America, you will learn to tag it with (say) “USA” and not “U.S.A.”, “US,” or “America.” And if you want to have your posts be found by people searching for posts written by members of your Dungeons & Dragon’s group, your group will make up a tag that no one else would use. How this sort of stuff occurs at Technorati depends to a large degree — but not entirely — on how Technorati chooses to enhance the system. Little changes will have rippling effects.

Third, this represents the externalization of tagging. That is, Technorati is a broker of tags, not a place where you create tags. There are other important functions that could be handled externally, including the creation of thesauruses so that items tagged as “USA” get clustered with ones tagged “America” and “Etats-Unis.” The particular apps where you tag stuff can, of course, compile their own thesaursi. And, they’re likely to be compiled automatically by noticing the different tags that are applied to the same item. But having a thesaurus compiled from a superset would help smaller-scale apps cluster tagged items well and would provide additional useful information to all clustering apps. Local thesauri are always going to contain the most valuable information, but info from the aggregated thesaurus can also help. But, there will be social effects from having external thesauri. I don’t know what those effects will be, but I suspect that they’ll be significant since thesauri are about meaning across groups differentiated by meaning.

Fourth, why can’t I subscribe at Technorati to an RSS feed for a particular tag? [Note: Dave Sifry tells me that RSS and API support are coming soon; they wanted to get the release out faster rather than completer.]

Fifth, Yay! This is a big day for tagging.

My first technorati tags: Technorati tags taxonomy

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Clay Shirky responds to Louis Rosenfeld’s piece on taxonomies vs. folksonomies. Lou argues that folksonomies aren’t as searchable and may not scale, but, he writes, treating both “as major parts of a single metadata ecology might expose a useful symbiosis.” Clay responds that economics weighs heavily on the side of folksonomies, since taxonomies and controlled vocabularies are so expensive to build and maintain. And Clay points to what I think is the most important point: We are just at the beginning of inventing folksonomies. Del.icio.us, for example, doesn’t yet show us how other people have tagged the page we’ve just bookmarked, which inhibits consistency in tagging. (On the other hand, that might encourage a tyranny of the majority in the development of folksonomies.) We are way early in the development of folksonomies. Exciting adventures in classification science await us. The game is afoot!

In any case, I haven’t done justice to either Lou or Clay’s post. Go ahead and give ’em a read…

Matthew Stoller has started a blog supporting Simon Rosenberg for chair of the Democratic National Committee. I don’t know enough about Rosenberg to have an opinion, but I have a lot of respect for Matthew’s judgment.

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