Netzwerg — Above, Below, and Beyond Tech Talk

Thursday, May 05, 2005 9:10 AM | rahel luethy | 3 comment(s)

folksonomy

i'm always a bit slow at hopping on the meme wagon. back in december, ben told me about flickr, a new photosharing website (actually, ben was also the one who told me about google back in 1999, so maybe it's just him being fast) . i forgot about flickr for a while, until it was in the news in march, when the company was aquired by yahoo!. beyond all it's photo-sharing-album-slideshow-email-friends-post-to-blog features, there are two things i like about flickr:

it is not owned by google
it offers an extremly cool tagging mechanism

the idea behind tagging is that anyone can add keywords (metadata) to any public photo maintained in flickr (all your photos are publicly visible unless you explicitly prevent it). this "practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords" has a name: it's called folksonomy. let's assume you upload your favorite fcb-shot to flickr and tag it with "fcb". soon, katrin comes along and tags your photo with "julio". dario also recognizes julio hernan rossi, but tags the photo with "neighbor" (which is correct in his case). so for all the sceptics, let's assume that jonas comes along, still can't tell julio and jimmy apart and tags the shot with "jimmygoal". your photo can thus be found whenever users search for any of the keywords. it's the frequency-dependent nature of folksonomy which makes it work so smoothly: the fact that most people add correct tags (like you or katrin), with "correct" meaning "what the majority of searchers mean". and maybe (just maybe...) there will be this one user searching for a shot of julio, also mixing up julio and jimmy, searching for "jimmygoal" and not even noticing that he's only successful because of the jonases in the world... i sometimes try to profit from frequency-dependency in another context: whenever i'm not sure about the use of a word in english (and leo can't help out), i simply type the snippet into google and count the number of hits. for example, i wasn't sure whether you say "hopping on the meme wagon" or "hopping onto the meme wagon":

"hopping on": 131'000 hits
"hopping onto": 11'400 hits

sometimes, you might be better off restricting your search with "site:*.com" because you don't want to dilute it due to lithuanian dislexics.