Comments on: HT06, Tagging Paper, Taxonomy, Flickr, Academic Article, ToRead

By: Jay Fienberg

Jay Fienberg — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 13:10:15 +0000

I’ve quickly read the paper, and it looks excellent–I am looking forward to give it a careful read.

It’s great to see your analysis in Section 4 (Taxonomy of Tagging Systems). To 4.1, I’d comment that the “object” aspect of what’s being tagged is dependent on additional taxonomies, that may be interesting to include in this kind of study.

For example, with Flickr, the image isn’t actually the “object” being tagged. What’s tagged is one or more web pages that, in the context of Flickr’s navigation and/or conceptual taxonomies, as represented through visual and information design on a series of web pages, represents an intersection between an image, a user, and, in some cases, a “set”.

So, I wonder in what ways the sense that one “tags images” in Flickr is influenced by things like cultural and/or technical familiarity with any or all of website navigation, web page layout, and social network system taxonomies. (And, anecdotally, the non-techies I know who have used Flickr, don’t get tags in Flickr, at least not on their own.)

***

(Also, in the intro, you indicate that a “folksonomy” is a kind of “folk taxonomy”. I think a “folk taxonomy” is, technically, something very different than a folksonomy. . .)

By: los anjalis

los anjalis — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 21:31:44 +0000

wow. i absolutely LOVE the title, so creative. and i didn’t know tagging could be so academic. rawks.

By: Bob Aman

Bob Aman — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 13:39:41 +0000

Ha, that actually is an awesome title, especially since it doesn’t have a colon.

By: Alla

Alla — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 13:05:41 +0000

I have actually decided to study tagging for my dissertation. I have put in for an NSF grant, and hopefully it will come through (won’t know until next year). So its great to see your paper and I will certainly be making contributions to this arena in the near-future

By: DrumsNWhistles

DrumsNWhistles — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 23:10:21 +0000

This is awesome. For over a year I’ve been scratching my head and slogging my way through figuring out tags. That was work enough, but then to try to explain it to other people who don’t speak any kind of Internet or geek has REALLY been a challenge. All of you have really boiled this down and isolated it well and I really, really appreciate it because now I can start to articulate it as well — something I really need to be doing in the next couple of months.

I also named your blog on my top 5 blogs not like my own for World Blog Day…

By: Mor

Mor — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 23:10:05 +0000

Not only we were clever, we already got copycats!

Look for “Tagging, communities, vocabulary, evolution” at CSCW:

http://www.cscw2006.org/program_technical_tue.html

By: Lukas

Lukas — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 20:45:40 +0000

(I know I should study what better minds have done first, but I have too much ego invested … if I end up in a cult led by Ted Nelson developing an interactive n-dimensional hypertext client, call my parents, ok?)

By: Lukas

Lukas — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 20:36:58 +0000

Funny, I spent four hours on a flight a few days ago killing myself trying to figure out the right way to get my peanut butter (rich semantic networks) and my chocolate (simple tagging) together. I’ll check out your references, though I’m guessing they’re focused around multi-user setups, or (worse) institutional setups that strive for objectivity, rather than personal systems which can afford to be idiosyncratic.

By: Bradley Horowitz

Bradley Horowitz — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 20:27:30 +0000

I think it’s clever! (The title)