IA Summit Folksonomies Panel
Categories: Information Architecture, Online Resources, Reviews, External Articles, Peter Morville, Gene Smith, Peter Merholz, Thomas Vander Wal
Tags: folksonomies, ia, ia_summit
In the last few days, I was searching for a summary on the discussion about folksonomies. A good list of links of up to date discussions was presented at the IA Summit in Montreal from:
- Gene Smith
- Peter Morville
- Peter Merholz
- Thomas Vander Wal
From the IA Summit in Montreal, Gene Smith at Atomiq gives the presentations’ links for the Folksonomies Panel.
- Introduction (PDF, 2.2MB) - Gene Smith
- Folksonomies: Better than Nothing? (PDF, 5.8MB) - Peter Morville
- Metadata for the Masses(PDF, 1.2MB) - Peter Merholz
- Folksonomies; A Wrappers’ Delight (PDF, 468KB) - Thomas Vander Wal
A summary of the presentations in a few quotes:
the old way makes trees… the new way rakes leaves together (David Weinberger)
And Peter Morville response’s:
And we know what happens to leaves when we rake them together. They rot. And become food for new trees.
On how to use folksonomies, Gene introduces the following formula:
Login + Large Content Set = Folksonomy Opportunity
Finally on the pros of folksonomies comparing with traditional classification methods:
The folksonomy piece complements a larger architecture plan, but it also allows the users to interact with and influence the architecture.
An IA can look at tagging patterns to help determine labeling, structure, search and best bets in the same way as query term logs. But unlike query term logs, tags have persistent value for the user because they are exposed and re-usable. (And, I’d argue, more closely approximate real user knowledge than search terms.) Tags also enable the creation of communities around classification. In fact, the folksonomy is a ridiculously low-cost kind of community that’s nothing more than a beneficial side effect of people tagging documents for their own future recall.
In the same category:
