Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

On Flickr we've had two reports of users meeting neighbors after seeing photos taken around their own homes in feeds they subscribed to, which showed photos tagged with the name of their hometown.

I am for some reason unable to make the preceding sentence any more intelligible.

But anyway, there's a social consequence.

David --

Not sure this will make things more interesting but I've been thinking a lot about the vageries of tags and easy it is to miss connections when the tags don't match. For instance, go to Flickr and search tags for bloggercon, then bloggercon3 -- some people loaded all bloggercon pictures under the first tag, others tried to do a stream just for the most recent one. One includes a cross-over referral, the other doesn't. Or look at CES and CES2005, CES2004. The generation of multiple similar tags for the same events defeats the idea of meshing photos of the same event into one collective stream. Part of me likes the random nature of the way people assign names but tagging implies order as does categorization.

What's the alternative? One idea might be to offer places to post tags for events or likely common experiences, a sort of tag clearninghouse. For instance, Flickr could put a note up on the sign-in page for tags linked to collective events. Conference organizers could post a tag on their site and in their other literature. Scrawl the tag in writing across a blackboard at the beginning of the next BloggerCon. Etc. For instance, I'd like to see each BloggerCon, CES, recurring event tagged by year with the ability to aggregate under a single tag.

At the rate it's going now my fear is the end result will be such a jumble of tags that we won't come closing to realizing the potential.

Two negative aspects of collaborative tagging as implemented by del.icio.us will be "del.icio.us spam" and some intrusive snooping.

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/MikeWalsh/2005/02/02#a369

Jumble Tag Sales are a possibility. I've already seen del.icio.us spam just last night, so tag spam killers will be along soon.

The overarching online effect of tags is already clear: attention aggregators. Tagging attracts tags. After a certain point a critical mass is reached and the page pointed at assumes a kind of stasis on the popular page. That's why the "recently" element on del.icio.us/popular is so important.

del.icio.us/popular is already the main page for seeing what's hot on the web.

I look for a del.icio.us/popular zeitgiest page or tool any time now. In fact, the sheer fact that I expect one means there probably already is one.

The other distinct possibility is that pages on del.icio.us/popular become so popular that they inhabit that zone for extremely long periods of time. There will probably be a need for some kind of timer so that they will spool off.

Of course, a del.icio.us flashmob could, it seems to me, spoof the popular page for a long, long time.

Folksonomies beg a middleware solution that will allow communities of expertise to develop and manage the tags. We need something between the arcane, top-down Library of Congress Subject Heading system (LCSH, the taxonomy of traditional librarianship) and the well-intended and fascinating but ultimately unscalable tagging by individuals (see Lou Rosenfeld's discussion of pictures tagged as "summer").

This reminds me of wikipedia in that the missing link is a tier of oversight and expertise.

I manage a website with a well-developed, well-managed folksonomy, btw (Librarians' Index to the Internet, http://lii.org ), and until a month ago I didn't know that's what we had. Gee, we've been in fashion for thirteen years! :-) (If you look at our folksonomy and think it needs more management, that will happen when we migrate to a system that articulates our language as a structured thesaurus. We didn't really intend to generate a language, but that's what we did.)

Gerard,

del.icio.us/popular = zeitgiest page

I checked it out and by god your right. Right now the activity is pretty pure (not a lot of obvious spamming). Notice how many of the tagged articles begin with "How to ..."

My favorite is "How to cut ...."

It's not a social effect yet, but Ben
Lund had an interesting suggestion at your "...why
tagging can't violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics" entry, that
tagging has initiated an evolutionary process. In other words emergence
is a possibility, even if the list of social effects may be, ahem, rather short
right now.