From Joshua Porter on his Bokardo, i was reading a pretty old post about Controlled Vocabularies and Folksonomies

As always Joshua makes some good points about the different approach of vocabularies and folksonomies:

The biggest peculiarity of folksonomies is that:

folksonomies …… are harnessing user behavior, rather than predicting or dictating it. The key to this is the ability of the folksonomy to change over time, an ability that controlled vocabularies often lack

Instead about vocabularies’ limits:

…the top-down method of creating information architecture doesn’t scale well. When new content is added, new users visit, old users change, or the industry changes, controlled vocabularies have a hard time keeping up. The reason why can be generalized to the following: human usage is always changing, and that change is rarely predictable within a vocabulary (and hierarchy) that is controlled

In a sentence:

Controlled vocabularies resist change while Folksonomies embrace change

And again:

the major difference here is where the change originates. In a controlled vocabulary it comes from those in control: the Information Architects. In a folksonomy like del.icio.us, change comes from those in control, too: the users.

From this other Joshua’s post Controlled Vocabularies Cut Off the Long Tail, an other fundamental difference between folksonomies and controlled vocabularies is that

An interesting property of folksonomies, or emergent taxonomies culled from tags written by everyone (in the system), is that they’re inclusive.They include everyone’s words, from the popular pundit’s propaganda to the has-been hermit’s hash. Nothing is spared, nothing taken out.

This aspect implies that using folksonomies:

We can also discover Long Tail topics: new or offbeat ideas that normally don’t get much attention or only get attention from a small fraction of the total population….

The Long tail paradigm suggests a diverse complentary use for folksonomies and taxonomies:

The Long Tail paradigm is about the discovery of information, not just the finding of it. The distinction I’m making here between discovery and finding is that users who discover information didn’t need to know it was there to begin with, and so couldn’t have been trying to find it. In a word: serendipity.

Controlled vocabularies, on the other hand, are mostly about finding information.

I agree with Joshua’s reflections. My doubts arises from the feeling that to be useful folksomies need a structure. And for me, it’s still unclear how to magically impose a structure on a distributed input from users mind.

Ajax approach seems now the only tool..

In the same category:

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 17th, 2005 at 4:27 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.