Folksonomies: Users Roll Their Own

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Folksonomies Users Roll Their Own

• by
• Tom Zillner
• WiLSWorld
• July 19, 2005

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The slides will be available on the WiLSWorld
2005 websitesoon.
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Folksonomy

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Folksonomy

• A critical mass of people at a single site
• Sharing their tagging

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Tagging

• Attach one-word descriptors to web sites or other
  items?tags
• Locate these sites or items through a search or
  browse of the tags

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Demodel.icio.us
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Del.icio.us

• At heart, Del.icio.us is a social bookmark
  manager
• But it can be much more if you choose to make it
  so
• Take note that there is no privacy to speak of
• Thousands of people have decided thats okay

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Del.icio.us

• People leverage others recommendations
• Rich feature set makes it easy to do so
• Subscription
• RSS

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Personal/Social Bookmark Managers

• Use a bookmarklet to capture pages or items
• Description
• Tags
• Often public/private designation

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Tags

• Note that tags can be very bad descriptors
• Single word may not be very revelatory
• Combining multiple words
• eiffeltower
• eiffel_tower
• eiffeltower
• What are the chances when you get a compound
  beyond two words that anyone will ever match a
  tag?

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Tagging Nothing New Per Se

• Online citation databases
• Keywords accompanying academic papers and their
  abstracts
• KWIC information retrieval
• Approximated by OPAC keyword searches

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Only librarians like to search, everyone else
likes to find
Roy Tennant
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Only catalogers like to catalog, everyone else
likes to find.
X
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Classification Schemes

• Aristotle-animals
• Library of Alexandria-kinds of writers, literary
  forms and other topics
• Dewey-created categories of knowledge
• Library of Congress-arose from the workings of
  the library

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Taxonomy
Taxonomy (from Greek ta????µ?a (taxinomia) from
the words taxis order and nomos law) may
refer to either a hierarchical classification of
things, or the principles underlying the
classification.
hierarchical
-Wikipedia
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Ontology is Overrated Categories, Links and
Tags

• by Clay Shirky

(Shirky Paper)
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Ontology

• The study of entities and their relations
• The question ontology asks is What kinds of
  things exist or can exist in the world, and what
  manner of relations can those things have with
  each other?
• Ontological classification organizing a set of
  entities (e.g., books) into groups based on their
  essences and possible relations.

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Shirkys claims

• Library Its all hierarchical, with an
  overarching ontology
• But its not really about the concepts, its
  about minimizing seek time to the shelvesdont
  confuse the container with the thing contained
• Books can be about multiple things, but they can
  only be in one place
• So, for this reason, the scheme is inherently
  flawed for web use

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Shirkys claims (cont.)

• In the digital world there is no shelf, so we
  dont have to put up with hierarchical
  classification schemes
• But still, we try

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1998
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2002
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Hierarchy
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Hierarchy Plus Links
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Hierarchy Plus Lots of Links
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Just the Links
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Yahoo vs. Google

• People chose search over categorization, and
  Yahoo sort of threw in the towel

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When Ontological Classification Works Well
(Shirky)

• Domain
• Small corpus
• Formal categories
• Stable entities
• Restricted entities
• Clear edges

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When Ontological Classification Works Well
(Shirky)

• Participants
• Expert Catalogers
• Authoritative source of judgment
• Coordinated users ???
• Expert users
• e.g., DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
  of Mental Disorders)

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When Ontological Classification Doesnt Work Well
(Shirky)

• Domain
• Large corpus
• No formal categories
• Unstable entries
• Unrestricted entries
• No clear edges

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When Ontological Classification Doesnt Work Well
(Shirky)

• Participants
• Uncoordinated users
• Amateur users
• Naïve catalogers
• No authority
• e.g., the Web

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end of Shirky
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But what about tags andfolksonomies?
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Its the third stage of cataloging the online
world

• Experts?Professionals
• Authors (or web-site owners)
• Users?Amateurs (from the Latin to love)

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Experts/Professionals

• Know the most
• Catalog only a small subset of the information
• Arguably catalog what is most important
• Arguably miss what is important in some
  fields?some of whats online
• Clearly have no time, money, or mission to
  catalog lots of useful or cool online stuff

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Authors/Web Site Owners

• Have a vested interest in getting viewers
• META keywords tag in HTML
• Dublin Core
• May take a great deal of care in getting the most
  accurate subject terms to attract viewers who
  will be interested in their work
• On the other hand, may attempt to deceive in
  order to attract viewers

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Users

• Are most interested in bookmarking things they
  believe are personally important or interesting
• Are often willing to share their knowledge
• Are usually naïve in their tagging vocabulary

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The Long Tail and Folksonomies

• In 1906, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto
  created a mathematical formula to describe the
  unequal distribution of wealth in his
  country?twenty percent of the people owned eighty
  percent of the wealth
• One of the 80-20 rules 20 percent of the
  collection is used 80 percent of the time
• There are a whole slew of 80-20 rules in every
  field

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The Long Tail (cont.)
Number of Uses of Tag
Tags
Thomas Vander Wal
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The Long Tail (cont.)

• The power of the long tail as applied to tagging
  is that
• it captures the mainstream as a significant trend
• but also captures unusual and offbeat
  nomenclature that a few might find valuable,
  i.e., might be able to find when searching

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Amateur Cataloging
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Its bad cataloging, but if users dont do it,
nobody will.
Only catalogers like to catalog, everyone else
likes to find.
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Cataloging

• Theres a lot of stuff online that gets tagged
  that has little value beyond the personal.
• Theres a little bit of stuff online that has
  lots of value often its already widely known to
  people it gets tagged, too

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Cataloging (cont.)

• Theres also quite a bit of stuff that has lots
  of value to a limited segment of people, and no
  value to most people
• Amateurs add value by pointing to stuff in their
  areas of interest

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Separating the wheat from the chaff

• Evaluating tagged stuff
• The reputation of the taggers
• Gleaned from their selections and the tags they
  use
• May be well-known within their community of
  interest
• The number of tags for a particular site

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Hierarchy Plus Lots of Links
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Hierarchy Plus Lots of Links and Tags

• Theres no reason why OPACs cant represent a
  hybrid
• They already do with direct links to online
  databases
• SFX and MetaLib, etc.
• But lets envision something more

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Tagging the OPAC The Most Radical Approach

• Provide a Del.icio.us for your catalog that is
  linked to it
• Allow people to do bookmarking and tagging of any
  item or site
• Allow them to publish their bookmarks and tags or
  keep them private

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Are catalogers an endangered species?

• Theres no substitute for care and quality
• Attention to matching what a thing is about
  within an established hierarchy and providing
  crosslinks
• Plenty of non-electronic resources
• Plenty of electronic resources that require
  quality cataloging

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Quality

• Authority control
• Controlled vocabulary
• Overall Quality Assurance and Control

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Invite Users to Join the Effort

• Offer suggested tags for items or sites based on
• artificial intelligence
• tags user just entered
• already-existing tags
• These suggested tags would be from thesauri
  constructed by catalogers or other librarian
  experts

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What about the erosion of quality with inclusion
of users tags?

• Users like to find
• Can allow patrons to search only the
  professionally-created catalog and exclude the
  amateur links/tags if they wish
• Can clearly label user efforts as
  suchdifferentiate the product
• Make it clear that the catalog offers more
  vetted resources

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An Aside on Privacy

• Permission-based
• If someone freely chooses to give up their
  privacy it is not the librarys/librarians job
  to act in loco parentis
• As an alternative to non-private sharing of
  bookmarks and tags, could do so without divulging
  identity
• Similarly, Most people who checked out this item
  and were willing to share their information also
  checked out

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Back to the Present
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Other Social Bookmark Sites
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CiteULike

• Targeted at academics to collect citations to
  papers and books (can also store full text)
• Includes bookmarklet that can automatically fill
  in citations from some online databases
• Usual tagging options
• Can export citations to BibTeX and EndNote

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furl

• Similar to del.icio.us
• Added attraction saves the web page you
  bookmark, so dont have to worry about link rot
• Multiple levels of privacy, so you can have
  personal pages, shared within a group, or public

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BlinkList

• Yet another bookmark manager
• Claims better features for organizing than
  bundles or groups
• Allows public and private bookmarks
• Offers autocompletion and suggestions when
  attaching tags

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MyWeb

• New (in Beta) from Yahoo!
• Quite similar to del.icio.us
• But, with more privacy

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Technorati

• Not really a bookmark manager
• Search 13.5 million blogs
• Search 1.6 million tags (including del.icio.us)
• Can maintain watch lists

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and many, many more
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and then theres flickr
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flickr

• The best way to store, sort, search and share
  your photos online
• There are differences between their free and
  Pro accounts (24.95/year)?size of storage,
  features of photos
• Can choose private/public photo options
• You can globally prevent others from downloading
  photos

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flickr

• People can comment on your photos
• Organizr can be used to organize your photos
• Browse
• Search
• Create a photoset
• Share photos with your groups

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flickr

• Slideshows
• Creative Commonssix options
• Tagging (of course)
• Easy capture of photos to blogs
• Favorites other peoples photos you bookmark
• Contacts people you want to share photos with

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flickr

• Groups people with like interests
• Can
• Chat
• Instant Message
• Share photos

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flickr

• One of the most popular tags is me (Roy
  Tennant)
• What is the compelling social interest? (This is
  not a rhetorical question!)

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I asked the thinkers on the LITA Top Tech Trends
panel about Folksonomies

• Clifford Lynchreally nothing new
• Karen Schneiderendearing that the civilian
  community has discovered metadata. Im waiting
  for next year when they discover authority
  control.
• Roy TennantFolksonomies suck. (Dont hold
  back, Roy. Say what you really think.)

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With all due respect...

• ...I think they missed the point
• Folksonomies are a social construct. Its not
  just the tags, its the sharing of information
  about resources through the tags. Its a
  grassroots effort that could only happen through
  the Web, and its only happening because of all
  that the Web is aboutsize and connectedness and
  openness.

(cont.)
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A critical mass has been reached on some services
that brings the Power Curve/Long Tail into play
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Another pundit

• Joan Frye Williams earlier in the session
  mentioned a mass collaboration phenomenon blogs,
  wikis, the Dean campaign, e-bay
• A few basic ground rules
• Large groups of people
• Little intermediation
• They really like it

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Joan Frye Williams (cont.)

• The environment itself is becoming the engine of
  productivity
• The network is becoming the new locus of trust,
  believing this network of strangers rather than
  big organizations, e.g., blogs breaking big new
  stories
• People arent trusting institutions, e.g.,
  libraries

X
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Joan Frye Williams(cont.)

• Librarians job includes creating mass
  environments carrying whole soup of patron
  information?comments, opinions of peers
• Libraries are perceived as not providing
  information of personal value
• BUT, can become even more trusted and central, by
  supporting personal information use and
  manipulation

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Folksonomies are a part of that
although the panelists didnt seem to think so.
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Scenario 1Shadow CatalogTagging the
Collectionand the Web
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Shadow Catalog

• Already talked about the creation side of this
• Heres a bit about the user side

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• Tagging can go along with other pieces of the
  social soup
• Reader reviews
• Most people who read this also read

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Scenario 2Library Supports Folksonomies
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Library Supports Folksonomies

• Workshops on Web services, e.g., Del.icio.us
• Workshops on tagging techniques and vocabulary
• Construction of online thesauri or (better)
  pointers to thesauri crafted by other librarians
  and interested users

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Scenario 3Toolmaking and Tool Distribution
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Toolmaking

• Thesauri construction
• APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) exist
  for most services, including Del.icio.us, Flickr,
  MyWeb
• An example of a possible tool is an aggregator
  which would bring together tags from the
  disparate services in a single user
  interface?aggregating personal information spaces

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Tool Distribution

• Libraries usually do not have the resources
  (people, time, mission) to produce tools
• But libraries can point to useful tools produced
  by others selection, a task that librarians do
  very well
• There are lots of tools being produced that deal
  with tags and folksonomies

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Scenario 4Services Enable Tagging of OPAC
Records
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Services Tagging the OPAC

• Individual users would find an OPAC record for an
  item of interest
• They would click on a del.icio.us or other
  services bookmarklet and create tags
• This would probably require some bookmarklet
  modification?requires buy in by proprietors of
  the service

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The bottom line

• Folksonomies and tagging are here to stay
• Things that would never have been cataloged will
  now be cataloged
• Folksonomies represent an opportunity, not a
  threat
• As we embrace our customers, we must also address
  their total personal information needs

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• Tom Zillner
• WiLS
• tzillner_at_wils.wisc.edu