When I talk about a possible mixture of traditional and emergent classification schemes the feedback I often hear is that tagging is easy and should continue to be easy because users will never use a complex system.

Let me say that I completly agree with this idea.

But why has a rich classification scheme and information retrieval system to be difficult? Facets can be surprisingly easy if you are able topresent them in an intuitive, visual, funny and quick-to-catch way for your users.

That’s exactly what Etsy.com is doing. Etsy is a niche marketplace for handmade things where people can sell and buy often unique items at only a portion of Ebay fee. Techcrunch and others have presented Etsy as the web 2.0 Ebay killer, but I’m not really interested in their mission. I will talk about their information architecture.

Providing a complete set of different access dimensions to their information, Etsy is showing the way. From their blog and their homepage, I understand that users can choose between:

• Time Machine and Time Machine 2
• Geolocator
• Materials and Tags
• Colors
• Sampler
• Categories
• Shop and Sellers
• Others (Suggestions, Connections, Hearts Me related to users and their favorites)

These tool are amazing flashy visualization clues to provide a specific access key to the large amount of items people want to sell or buy. They are simple, intuitive and funny.

But they are facets!!!!! Come back to Ranganathan PMEST super categories:

• Time Machines fall under the Time super category
• Geolocator falls under the Space one
• Shop and Sellers implement the super facet Personality (implicity also the sold items are in Personality)
• Tags, Materials, Colors and Categories fall under the super category Matter
• Suggestions, Connections, Hearts Me could be put under Energy

You are probably an information architect or a different kind of information involved guy. Did you realized this immediately having a quick look at the site? I don’t think so.

Why bothering to introduce so many access doors? Simply to let each user find his path, in his own way. And looking at the forum.. people love these tools.

But Etsy is an illuminating example also from another perspective: while their higher level categories have been statically defined, sub categories are dynamical. They are tags! We have a shining example of taxonomies/folksonomies mixture!

As showed by Karl Fast in his piece From Pace Layering to Resilience Theory: The Complex Implications of Tagging for Information Architecture, folksonomies can be leveraged to add a faster moving layer above the slower traditional information architecture given by categories. The chaos of users proposed keywords is then restricted in a well thought framework to enhance the content findability. That’s an example of metadata ecology!

So the point is that we have already good examples of advanced folksonomies’ usage. The better ones mix smoothly social tagging, taxonomies and faceted classification in a trasparent way for final users.

It’s up to service designers and programmers deciding how much magical sauce to put into the game: you can ask people to do the work for you or you can write algorithmical solutions (for example agglomerative clustering, geolocalization, average color extraction, etc). Finding the right balance is not so easy anyway: you can extrapolate the city from which I’m posting but what If, during a trip, I’m posting from Australia an item that I’m actually selling from Italy?

Do you really believe in magics? Your users have the answer!

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 29th, 2006 at 12:28 am and is filed under Information Architecture. 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.