There’s been alot of discussion as to the benefits and the risks to customer experience inherent in the bottom up process of Folksonomies, or ‘tags’ or ‘tag clouds’ (basically the process of allowing users to create their own taxonomies that feed a central ‘community taxonomy’ hence the Folksonomy).
Well flickr has taken the concept of Folksonomy to the next level with ‘clusters’ or ‘tag clusters’. It looks like the company itsef is now adding structure to the Folksonomy by grouping similar terms together. So what we have now is a meeting of the minds top-down meets bottom up, in a quite harmonious manner. I guess the interesting thing is here is that the bottom up process of tagging provided the essential, but unstructured meta data that the company could then massage, so instead of “never the twain shall meet”, one is feeding the other.
I’m sure a new term will be coined for this, in fact if you have any ideas feel free to post a comment.
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This is def a good thing, but:
I find Flickr’s tags less useful than del.icio.us’ simply because it doesn’t suggest tags (how could it, right?), or even show me my tag cloud to pick from when I’m tagging a new photo (”Did I call it ‘dog’ or ‘pavlov’ or ‘Pavlov?’”). That and because photos by complete strangers aren’t as interesting to me — as opposed to del.icio.us, where knowing what geeks are interested in the same articles as I am does have some use, as does simply knowing the relative size of a meme. If I need stock photos istockphoto.com is much better. What I need is a “contacts only” shared tagging system in Flickr.
“Clusters” are getting there in a system I vaguely described at the end of this: http://danielsjourney.com/blog/index.php?file=2005_05.xml&id=04153233
“Trickle-up classification” perhaps? Then we could send spams that say “Does it ever shoot all over the place when you wish it would just trickle up?”
RE>I’m sure a new term will be coined for this, in fact if you have any ideas feel free to post a comment.
How about “synonyms”?
ha ha Victor
And Daniel, I really liked that post you linked to, very similar ideas, and very aligned with what Peter Merholz was recently talking about in his rebuttle of Clay Shirky’s article on taxonomies vs. folksonomies, see Clay Shirky’s Viewpoints are Overrated