Again from Joshua Porter an enlightning post entitled I’ve Heard of Folksonomies. Now How do I Apply them to My Site?.

The title is a little misleading in my opionion, but the meaning very very clear and the narration always precise.

Joshua is reflecting about the real power of folksonomies that does not necessarily concerns the tagging activity.

What makes the difference are people!

Folksonomies are not simply visitors tagging something but an aggregation of informations provided by them:

It is this act of aggregation, and not the act of tagging, that give folksonomies their power. Without aggregation, tags are just tags, with no meaning beyond the local meaning that each user gives to their own set….
All we need is something that we can aggregate…

Good examples are everywhere and they existed a lot before folksonomies emerged. Think about the personalization features of Amazon or the most emailed articles functionality from the New York Times online.

For New York Times:

What they do is aggregate the activity of people emailing articles and then create a list out of them so others can see…

…..this functionality leverages aggregate human behavior in much the same way that folksonomies do.

For Amazon recommendations:

The activity aggregated here, instead of tagging, is the viewing of a product page. It is explicit, can be aggregated, and easy to see patterns in

So the conclusions are:

The main thing is that the activity you choose to observe needs to be explicit, can be aggregated, and important to the needs of your site.

In the same category:

This entry was posted on Monday, March 14th, 2005 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Information Architecture, External Articles, Bokardo, Joshua Porter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.