Findability and folksonomies
I am blogging some stuff from the iainstitute mailing list, whose archive is currently not public, which is kinda ironic for an organization that focuses on findability.
Anyways. Peter Morville (with a new book on findability) and Thomas Vanderwal (who coined the term folksonomy) sparring over folksonomies:
Thomas, refering to an article Peter wrote:
"I really like most of the article. I agree with the Wikipedia section, but have more scepticism as the *folksonomy* entry is nearly always wrong these days with the definition and examples it gives.
I do start running into problems with your article in the folksonomy area. I agree that early on the Technorati folks coopted the folksonomy term, but they have shied away from its use of late as they realize it is not what it is doing with their tagging effort.
What Technorati is doing is what Cory Doctorow labelled Metacrap.
Technorati tagging is a gory mess, it adds little value, it captures a variety of tagging (and decidedly non-tagging -- commercial weblog tools have their categories counted as tags by Technorati) practices with various points of view and gumbles them up. It could even be worse than Metacrap. I have talked with them a fair amount about how to approach fixing it and time will show if they have an interest.
It seems you have had blinders on with the folksonomy tools since the IA Summit in Montreal Peter. As the serendipity tools like http://del.icio.us have been growing up into fairly decent findability tools as their corpus of materials grows. The creator of del.icio.us has left his day job and has been focussing on the tool as a full-time job and has five other developers now making the product better. They built their own search engine which has just gone live and is permitting their corpus, which is based on their contributors' point of view, to be used more easily.
Having just returned from Europe from the Euro IA Summit, I had a lot of discussions with people there about folksonomy. Many wished I had presented on that subject or were writing a book on the subject (hmm...). There is a problem in Europe and with the rest of the world
that folksonomies help resolve, it is a cross-cultural tool. It easily leverages the language of those tagging from one culture and uses the object being tagged as a pivot to find other cultures vocabulary for similar objects. Folksonomies are quite a popular tool in non-parochial Amerian eyes. They help greatly with findability.
The key piece is that the folksonomy tools are broad folksonomies so people can pivot.
[...]
Peter answers:
I'm glad you enjoyed (most of) the authority article, and I appreciate your thoughtful response. I do think folksonomies as an experimental subject are very interesting, and I don't dispute that tagging can improve findability and refindability. I'm just not sure that most people most of the time will find it worth the investment in the long-run. I forced myself to try del.icio.us before the IA summit panel so I'd have something useful to say about it. I haven't used it since. In any case, I think we'll have to agree to disagree on some (but not all) of these issues.
Thomas:
You really should try del.icio.us again, particularly since most of what you stated is has not been the case for many months and you are a voice of authority. You should also try Yahoo's My Web. Yes, they do take a little time, but the pay off is quite grand.
[...]
Peter:
When I get a chance, I will revisit del.icio.us and explore Yahoo's My Web.
Then I will be much better prepared to criticize them :-) In the meantime, I
will maintain my skepticism, based purely on my problem with the following
proposition:
"Yes, they do take a little time, but the pay off is quite grand."
Google Desktop takes no time and the refindability payoff is arguably much
better.