ETECH Notes: Folksonomy, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess

Here are my notes from "Folksonomy, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess," a conversation between Clay Shirky, Stewart "Flickr" Butterfield, Joshua "Delicious" Schachter and Jimmy "Wikipedia" Wales at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego. Folksonomy is the process of letting users generate and apply their own tags to shared items (such as blog-posts, encyclopedia entries, photos, links, lists or interests, or what have you) and then discovering which tegs users share with one another. Unlike previous ventures into this field, the tags aren't "controlled" -- any user can invent one and any user can apply them to anything, and yet it all works.

Jimmy: We launched ours last summer after knowing we needed it for a long time. For the first two weeks in English Wikipedia, it was a madhouse with all kinds of categorization. The Germans were more reserved but after a few weeks it caught on there. Eventually, because people could adjust categories, it all settled down. We did it because that's the Wikipedia way -- we never considered doing it any other way.

Stewart: It's not really categorization on Flickr -- it's about letting users remember. If I add the "Norma" tag to pix of my mom, whose name is Norma, I don't think it goes into the Norma category. The unfortunate thing about the term "folksonomy" is that it implies that it's a replacement for categorization. People categorize things by noting what they do or don't have: mammals have hair and live babies; does it have property a? then it's a whatever.

Joshua: I was collecting 20,000 links in a text-file, and somewhere along the way I started adding a hash mark and some text, so I could e.g. grep out all the WiFi links and send them to a friend. Later I built a Web version so I could send an URL to a friend, but it was standalone. Eventually I made it massively multiplayer. The interesting group behavior is the tagging that isn't categorization, e.g., "To read" -- not a category, though it has a big group and a lot of social and user context. People make tags for groups working together, workflow in RSS -- that's what's most surprising.

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