This spring, I gave a pair of talks on opposite coasts on the subject of categorization and tagging. The first was entitled Ontology Is Overrated, given at the O’Reilly ETech conference in March. Then, in April I gave a talk at IMCExpo called “Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification.”
I’ve just put up an edited concatenation of those two talks, coupled with invaluable editorial suggestions from Alicia Cervini. It’s called Ontology is Overrated — Categories, Links, and Tags. Here’s the intro:
Today I want to talk about categorization, and I want to convince you that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong. In particular, I want to convince you that many of the ways we’re attempting to apply categorization to the electronic world are actually a bad fit, because we’ve adopted habits of mind that are left over from earlier strategies.
I also want to convince you that what we’re seeing when we see the Web is actually a radical break with previous categorization strategies, rather than an extension of them. The second part of the talk is more speculative, because it is often the case that old systems get broken before people know what’s going to take their place. (Anyone watching the music industry can see this at work today.) That’s what I think is happening with categorization.
What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units — the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging — free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints — seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets.
More at Ontology is Overrated — Categories, Links, and Tags.
Great essay, I especially appreciate the helpful charts! One minor issue: after the “Tag Distributions” chart, you refer to “the characteristic long tail of people who use many fewer tags than the power taggers.” I can’t see a way that this is a “long tail” according to the common usage: the observation that for many distributions, the number of elements with outlying values (the “tail”) may be cumulatively significant compared to the number of elements clustered near the average. More details are in http://www.econometa.com/archives/9; I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.
Comment by Adam — May 17, 2005 @ 12:15 pm
Folksonomies
Just after reading tagsonomy, about folksonomies, I came to realize that my blog has the poorest categories possible. Time to…
Trackback by Mercurial — May 20, 2005 @ 10:15 am
RSS Feeds Me
While switching RSS feed readers (to NetNewsWire) I thought I’d update the list of RSS feeds that nourish my brain:…
Trackback by Our Mediated World — May 20, 2005 @ 11:34 am
I read Clay Shirky’s article and appreciate its clarity and well-reasoned point of view. It has sparked refinements in my thinking about paths to take in my work. At the same time, it raises the same kinds of worries I’ve had about this debate (and expressed them at the Folksonomy panel at IA 2005).
There seems to be an impulse to frame two methodolgies in an adversarial position when the authentic value lies in identifying how they complement each other. This adversarial framing follows a pretty common trend in the history of ideas: identify one ideology as aligned with a withdrawn elite and the other with a more populist, democratic base. Of course, we all prefer a more democratic approach don’t we?
Some presentations of the tensions between professionally-mediated taxonomies and organic folksonomies follow this rhetorical pattern…and I hope that will fade soon.
In my line of work, healthcare, a mediated taxonomy on content resources is preferred to a more organic, democratic tagging of resources. We just cannot afford the risk of error in this domain. This, of course, does not make us a withdrawn elite, monkishly sitting in rooms and reciting MESH over and over again. We pore over search logs, we interact with people using our resources to find their information, we are self-conscious about our categorization decisions and always check them against less esoteric or technical conceptions….we try to be fair arbiters.
Of course, we may view ourselves as fair arbiters while others view us as protective and paternalist. I think one of the most valuable repercussions of this debate is fostering that self-consciousness in the “well-designed metadata” crowd.
I belive that the apparent contrasts between folksonomists and well-designed taxonomists usually can be traced to a lack of intellectual credit one side gives to the other. A folksonomist may accuse the choice of a controlled taxonomy as being reified and not responsive to user needs. A taxonomist may accuse the choice of an organic folksonomy as unbridled chaos.
I may sound naive, but I view both approaches as tools in my kit whose uses are dependent on context. And I believe most people agree and know this — but it sure is a fun debate to write about!
More about this at http://elliptic.typepad.com
Thanks and sorry about the length.
Eric
Comment by Eric P. — May 24, 2005 @ 12:58 pm
How come 9 of 12 posts on “a blog on tagging” have no tags?
(”Eat your own dog food” comes to mind…
Comment by frankwestphal — May 24, 2005 @ 7:58 pm
Use of Tags on del.icio.us follows a powerlaw
I read the wonderful Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags by Clay Shirky (highly recommended! Read it all!). Near the end, he speaks about “Tag Distributions on del.icio.us” and shows a graph that resembles a powerlaw (even if this…
Trackback by Paolo Massa Blog — May 28, 2005 @ 2:12 pm
Visualizing time trends in how a site is tagged on del.icio.us: cloudalicious
The previous entry was about “powerlaws in the use of tags on del.icio.us”. Then at http://del.icio.us/tag/powerlaw, i found Pietro Speroni’s great post Tagclouds and cultural changes that (also) introduces cloudalicious, a one-night project of Terr…
Trackback by Paolo Massa Blog — May 28, 2005 @ 3:02 pm
Tagsonomies and digital libraries
I say that digital libraries, in order to be relevant to this age, have to be more than just digital manifestations of the content and catalogs from earlier times. If everyone is an author on the web, so is everyone a cataloguer. When the library patr…
Trackback by electronicity.org — August 31, 2005 @ 9:51 pm