Comments on: Ken Norton: Humans at both ends of the rope…

By: You’re It! » Blog Archive » Tom Coates on bubble-up folksonomies

Fri, 02 Sep 2005 18:24:24 +0000

[...] of reasons. First, it recognizes the value of some semantics in the system (that is, the humans-at-both-ends-of-the-rope approach would be insufficient on its [...]

By: Otis

Otis — Tue, 17 May 2005 16:07:45 +0000

Joel: some tagging systems DO help you overcome the “San Francisco” vs “sanfrancisco” problem.

Take a look at this screenshot to see how Simpy does it.

People still have the choice. You can use one of the offered tags, your own tag, you can use both of them at the same twice. You can tag newyork.craigslist.com with “San Francisco” or “Frisco” if you like, Simpy doesn’t care – tag it whichever way it helps you and those close to you.

By: Joshua Porter

Joshua Porter — Mon, 16 May 2005 16:10:56 +0000

In my experience, creating a single meaning (removing ambiguity) is useful in contexts where work needs to be done, like on a corporate intranet. This means a controlled vocabulary with only one San Francisco. This isn’t very interesting, but there’s a lot of money in it.

Allowing ambiguity is useful in contexts where learning needs to be done, like on a site like this or Del.icio.us. This means an uncontrolled vocabulary and San Francisco, san_francisco, and sanFran. This is much more interesting, but not as much money in it.

Like Joel says, learning (thinking) is an odd duck because it’s an investment that some people clearly do not want to make. Others seem to revel in it.

By: Joel

Joel — Mon, 16 May 2005 15:36:47 +0000

There is a cost as well: it requires those brains to do work (ie thinking), which humans try to avoid whenever necessary. This is especially a cost for people who are new to a content organization system or use it too rarely to learn its intricacies. How is a newbie to know that some information on “San Francisco” will be at sanfrancisco and some at san_francisco and some at san+francisco and some at “bayarea” and some at “bay_area”? This could potentially be overcome with UI, but current tagging systems certainly doesn’t provide any sorts of hints right now. Those are the sorts of hints and improved precision that are paid for with the extra cost of markup into a controlled system.

By: tuur

tuur — Sun, 15 May 2005 14:26:43 +0000

I agree on you that links are way better tags than "tags" as we know them. Stephen Downes has been writing about the handicaps of tagging in the blogosphere as well, and has come up with an alternative: edu_rss I wrote a post about what he has to say on metadata. The Self Organizing network Downes’ idea of an optimal, meaningful network is one that organises itself, by the use of ... Third party metadata: * metatdata about a resource not created by the author of the resource … * includes: links, references, ratings, annotation, context of use… * attached both to the resource (and hence the resource author) but also to the commentator * Creates a multi-dimensional semantic social network