Joho the Blog
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March 26, 2005
Companies like Boeing spend years developing controlled vocabularies to drive ambiguity out of their technical documentation. For example, tech writers might be told to use the word "turn" but not "twist" when describing any circular motion involving a tool. And, at Corbis, the home of millions of digital images, the in-house cataloguers might be told to use the word "shore" and not "beach" when describing coastal photos. But no one is in a position to write a controlled vocabulary for the Internet, And if they were, you can be sure that many of us would be twisting the night away on the beach, just to break the rules. This is the promise and the risk of folksonomies. Folksonomies arise when people are tagging objects (Web pages, photos, etc.) in public. If you want something to be found by others, you'll choose the most popular tag. That adds yet more momentum to that tag. And before you know it, most people tag posts about PC Forum as "pcforum05," not "pcf", "pcf05" or "Esther's thang." Folksonomies are bottom-up controlled vocabularies. For not very good reasons, the word "controlled" raises a red flag for me. Here's my mental back-and-forth on the issue: Back: A folksonomy is not centrally controlled, which is good because a vocabulary dictator would not only frequently get it wrong, but would silently enforce her interpretation. Word choice is too important to be left to the tyrants. In fact, the first thing tyrants do is try to control our word choices. Forth: But a folksonomy is nonetheless controlled by a majority. Do folksonomies replace the central vocabulary dictator with an emergent dictator? The word choices are likely to be more in tune with majority thinking, but the conformism of the hippies was as bad as the conformism of the suits. Back: This is simply how language works. Words and meanings arise from a type of "conformism," but so what? Meaning itself is a type of conformism, you aging hippie douchebag! Forth: But, language changes through implicit evocations of meaning. There is no word dictator who declares "Thou shalt now replace the word 'idea' with 'meme.'" Nope, we hear the word, get a sense from context or from a bumbling, hand-waving definition from someone at a party, and we appropriate it. After a while, a dictionary notices and attempts to freeze and formalize the definition. Yet, tags are explicit. They take something as rich in meaning as a family photo and reduce it to a single word. That's a diminishment. Back: Big freaking deal. Categorization diminishes. Everyone knows that. It's why we categorize: It reduces complexity to something manageable at least for the moment. But often categorization diminishes so that things in their richness can be found: Menus in restaurants categorize food so you can taste it in all its glory. And if people feel that the popular tags are not categorizing objects the way they want, they can build local folksonomies, using the tags accepted by their social group. Forth: Not in the commercial world. Steve Papa at Endeca at the PCForum open discussion a few days ago pointed to eBay as an example: There are economic reasons to describe your items for sale using the most popular language. E.g., call it a "notebook," not a "laptop." Likewise, where there are economic or other reasons for people to use the popular tags, some folksonomies will dominate. This will undoubtedly drive some ambiguity out of our everyday language. For example, someone pointed out to me recently that CNN started out calling the tsunami a "tidal wave," but switched when everyone else was calling it a "tsunami." That sort of thing will happen faster and more regularly as folksonomies grow in more and more fields. Back: Big deal. Tsunami = tidal wave. And because CNN switched, now we can find its stories when we search for "tsunami." Forth: No two words are every exactly the same. And clarity leads to division. Imagine that a site like NYTimes.com allows us to tag their posts in a del.icio.us sort of way. (We can do that already at del.icio.us, of course, but doing it on the Times site would be different.) There will be tag wars over whether to tag articles as "tax relief" or "wealthy welfare." Communities will form around semantics, making George Lakoff happy, but further driving us apart. Back: So the only thing that lets us live together is the ambiguity of our language? If we ever really understood each other, we'd kill each other? Forth: Well, ambiguity sure helps. What would we do without those gray zones? Me: Folksonomies will influence how we use words outside of the tagging environment. It will sometimes replace the subtle, organic ways in which language evolves with the crudity endemic to explicitness. Groups will form around words, and words will form around groups, as always. We and our language will survive. [Technorati tags: taxonomy folksonomy tags] Posted
by D. Weinberger at March 26, 2005 08:02 AM
TrackBackListed below are links to weblogs that reference Controlled and suggested vocabularies: Are tags making us dumb?:
» Back and forth on folksonomies as controlled vocabularies from Many-to-Many Tracked on March 26, 2005 08:18 AM
» Tags: The lowest common denominator. from larry borsato Tracked on March 26, 2005 09:15 PM
» Oh What a Tangled Web We Tag from cogdogblog Tracked on March 27, 2005 11:43 PM
» Folksonomies for better or worse from Things I Know I Know Tracked on March 28, 2005 04:00 PM
» Early birds... from Consumerpedia Blog Tracked on March 29, 2005 03:19 PM
» Can I Give You That Answer? from XplanaRadio Tracked on March 30, 2005 08:02 AM
» Can I Give You That Answer? from XplanaZine Tracked on March 30, 2005 08:06 AM
» Can I Give You That Answer? from XplanaZine Tracked on March 30, 2005 09:03 AM
» Tags in the Quest for New Knowledge: further commentary! from Connectivity: Spike Hall's RU Weblog Tracked on April 2, 2005 11:18 PM
» Tags in the Quest for New Knowledge: further commentary! from Connectivity: Spike Hall's RU Weblog Tracked on April 3, 2005 09:57 AM
» Le parole sono importanti from Alberto Mucignat Tracked on May 5, 2005 08:38 AM
» Tras las google bombs, tag wars from Atalaya: desde la tela de araña Tracked on May 11, 2005 12:52 PM |
Comments
Have you ever considered that artificial intelligence could solve this problem. Tags are in place for computers to read. What if the computer knew that a 'shore' was sometimes a synonym for 'beach', 'tsunami' for 'tidal wave'. Furthermore, what if the computer knew that a tsunami was a disaster, or that a beach is a place. Then computers could start reasoning with the tags they find. There was an attempt at this with the opencyc.org project which is a "general knowledge base and commonsense reasoning engine". Looks like activity there has died... but sounds like a good idea to me.
Posted by: Gary | March 26, 2005 10:14 AM
The tags that netizens create for themselves will be the avatar of the internet. If you tag somrthing which does not make sense to the bigger whole, it will get lost. Like the divide between beach and shore is a matter of perception. Can a commonsense inference engine draw the conculsions yes. But how about the difference beteen bitch and beach ?
Posted by: /pd | March 26, 2005 10:31 AM
FYI, I've launched a new social bookmarking / tagging site http://de.lirio.us this week. Soon, I'm sure more site will pop up and it'll be interesting to see how tags from different yet related sites intermingle.
Posted by: Steve Mallett | March 26, 2005 11:34 AM
eyes.glazing.over
Posted by: Sherri | March 26, 2005 12:33 PM
I repost, my thoughts here. As People may get the wrong idea on my previous posting. just to bring it into context, In my earlier earlier AI research with NLP, we split our sides with laughter with the NLP (NAtural Language processer) engine tranlsating the context of certain words. My comments above articlates a point which imho reside within the releam of AI, speech processing and context inference.
Posted by: /pd | March 26, 2005 01:21 PM
how many folksonomies can one fit on the end of a blogosphere?
Posted by: quonsar | March 26, 2005 01:29 PM
Back and Forth?
Why not To and Fro...something with no possibility of misconstrued connotation? I mean after all, back could lend an air of negativity or regression, whereas the Back comments seem to be more whole-heartedly suppotive of folksonomies.
This of course itself being an unintended example of decentralized organization and it's occasional foibles. :)
Posted by: Jeremy | March 26, 2005 08:11 PM
Tsunami does not equal tidal wave. They have nothing to do with tides.
Posted by: Larry Borsato | March 26, 2005 09:01 PM
If it's a matter of having too many tags for the one item (e.g. "pcforum05," not "pcf", "pcf05", etc), I don't think there's much to really mull over, honestly. I mean I have this problem when I tag my photos on Flickr. I'm forever tagging "color" and "colour" together. And also on delicious, too, I'm doing the same thing. Most of my feeds for instance -- which I read in Bloglines -- are made up of tag combos (e.g. "rss+tag", "rss+tags", "html", "xhtml"). Okay, you get the idea. Anyway, I think the beauty of tagging is that it's just another medium that doesn't need to be controlled (IMO). In fact I believe that by trying to control tagging as it stands today would essentially be a complete waste of time. I also can't see the point in proposing the idea. Anyway, the medium is strong enough to stand on its own. Why bother trying to bend the rules? Popular tags will always be present. More unique, somewhat nonsensical tags (and the practice of using them) will definitely remain applicable too. If it ain't broke, right?
Posted by: Scott | March 26, 2005 10:57 PM
I suspect there is an argument one might make that global hubs like eBay are strong drivers toward reduced diversity in the vocabulary used to describe goods. For example I am much less likely to use the tag groupware v.s. social-software when tagging at del.icio.us, since I know one of these has an audience and I suspect the other doesn't. Economic actors work very hard to own particular terms as evidenced by Word, Office, The Long Tail.
Posted by: Ben Hyde | March 27, 2005 03:14 PM
I could imagine one solution: automated group-filtered tag synonyms.
Posted by: Philipp Lenssen | March 27, 2005 07:23 PM
But as long as one person's freedom fighter is another's terrorist you're not really going to get too far with synonyms, are you? Maybe tag ANTONYMS would be more useful. While surfing things related to PC Forum 05 it might be great to see "Want anohter perspective on this? Try Esther's Thang!"
Posted by: Jill | March 28, 2005 02:56 PM
Gary Price from Search Engine Watch and ResourceShelf (I think he's a librarian) posted about the problems of synonyms last month in a comment on Searchblog.
http://battellemedia.com/archives/001258.php#9786
Posted by: tony | March 28, 2005 04:08 PM
Question: Will tags help or hinder diversity on the web?
Will folksonomies become de-centralized?
As a technical writer by trade I have love/hate relationship with tags at the moment, everytime I go to add some I automatically go searching for the master list, meaning I spend more time tagging things than I do posting them (sometimes).
Maybe a simple "how to index" course needs to be sent round - retitled "how to tag". Inverse terms etc etc
Posted by: Gordon | March 29, 2005 05:38 AM
Taxonomies and folksonomies don't appear to me to be incompatible. Using google suggest type functionality, one could pretty easily supplement folksonomies with a taxonomy that has been developed with the richness and rigor of a librarian. Folksonomies will help fill the void with a combination of deep domain expertise by introducing new terms that folks should consider adding to a taxonomy and can help identify new trends/terms/synonyms that people should consider.
We should also remember that the root of folksonomies is an individual ... for the individual, that tag should provide a memory cue for future reference.
So, if the two are feeding and reinforcing one another, shouldn't they make us smarter ...?
See the comments in this blog ...
http://www.darcynorman.net/2005/02/04/podcast-is-back-on-the-air
and the notes in this blog ...
http://blog.educause.edu/mpasiewicz/archive/2005/01/27/592.aspx
for more on my thoughts.
BTW, thanks for the really interesting posting.
Matt
Posted by: Matt Pasiewicz | March 29, 2005 02:18 PM
I'm following the argument, but you know what I
really like here? I'm liking this "Back and Forth"
thing. All aging hippie douchebags should be forced
to out their own internal contradictions in this manner.
Perhaps this can be mandated henceforth by the
Library of Congress.
Posted by: Bruce Sterling | April 3, 2005 05:55 AM
I can totally see both sides, however, I believe that all of this is so new it's pure from the blatant advertising we get in every day life forced on us. I generally don't run into much spam on these sites, unless you count the idea of paid/free accounts for different benefits of using the accunts as a spam site. What's amazing to me is that I'm not seeing 200 porn sites on the front page of delicious right now, or randomly generated blog pages tagged with 500 tags all pointing to the newer trends in programming, hardware, etc. how long will it be before tons of companies feel they can post hundreds of fake blogs all over the 500 domains they own all claiming in some randomly generated way that the new "Toshiba Tecra X" is the greatest product ever, complete with past posts, calendars with personal events, photos, etc. etc.
How does this relate to the idea of becoming dumber?
I feel every second I'm being lied to by an advertisement that promises me instant pleasure and tons of babes if I buy their gizmo is making me a stupider person.
del.icio.us tags as links for right now = no ad pages
google searches = occasional bullshit ad sites or sites now selling what used to be free because their site has the #1 pagerank on google for that term.
if anything, tagging is making me smarter, and a hell of a lot more choosy about what I'm reading on the net.
I'm wasting a lot less time, and getting a lot more done with my computer than ever before, I don't know about you though.
Posted by: Jason Altenburg | April 17, 2005 10:50 AM
The articles on the page below don't deal with tags per se, but with similar problems of disambiguation etc among 'concepts' -- which can in fact be considered a form of tags -- automatically extracted from the biomedical literature. So while not directly related, some of these papers could provide food for thought
http://www.biosemantics.org/publications/index.html
Posted by: Declan | July 2, 2005 11:27 AM