Exploring Folksonomies After Midnight November 2, 2006

D’oh… reading week has melted my brain and I forgot to post this LAST WEEK!

The Lawley article has an interesting start - discussing the potential ‘evil’ in folksonomies, such as deliberately mislabeled items. I have wondered about how advertisers could misuse tags to promote their product (simply add the ‘most popular tag today’ to your item and wham-o!). But this article changes direction pretty quickly to discuss some intriguing implications of a tagging game - that taggers copy others’ bad choices without thinking in-depth about the best tags. While it is a good cautionary tale, I must agree with my classmate Gonzo Librarian who says “It’s possible that this weakness may be a consequence of that particular game, rather than an inherent flaw of folksonomies.” But I do often find myself looking at the suggested tags when labelling my items… hmm… I will think more critically about my choices in the future!

We’re reading two articles by Carol Ou this week, White-Paperish Thing (about distributed classification), and folksonomy? ethnoclassification? libraries? wha?. The first one is a 2003 blog post about the potential of “a system of distributed classification” for electronic journals, which seems pretty forward-thinking to me. The second one is from 2004 and discusses “partial ethnoclassification” or “distributed classification,” a happy classification medium that lies between leaving it all up to the users or paying huge sums to a librarian.

The podcast Talking with Talis: the Library 2.0 Folksonomy Gang was long. This is why I forgot to post! I decided to go to sleep and listen in the morning. My initial impressions of the podcast were not related to folksonomy: it was great to recognize some of these specialists names, thanks to this course; it was a nice way to spice up the homework, Amanda; and it is a little difficult listening to so many voices on one podcast, it sounds a bit like a conference call; podcasts are harder to quote than articles. These speakers tend to share the general opinion that folksonomies and tagging should be used to compliment traditional classification systems, and are excited about putting some of the control into the users’ hands. They debate implementing restrictions on tags for library systems, such as suggesting words for patrons to select, so as to avoid having too many similar categories in use. But the key point is not to have librarians dictate the folksonomy, but for the suggested words to come from previous entries from other users. Yikes! They just chatted about reordering the books in a library according to users’ tags. I am not a fan of that idea because I think the key point of tagging is so that the individual can find it, not the collective, so one person’s tags could be very random to another person. The discussion about the special implications of mis-tagging in a library situation was very interesting. Both sides offered a good point: people will inevitably become upset about seeing a racist tag in a library setting, but on the other side internet users are used to filtering out such offensive content. I think librarians will have to monitor the tags somewhat, at least to remove offensive ones that have been brought to their attention. Finally, one participant poses the question - who would want to tag a book in a library? How would you achieve a significant number of tags? We must all consider this before getting to excited about its use in a public library for books.