Tagging Ecologies
Categories: Information Architecture
Tags: attention, etsy, folksonomies, folksonomy, healthline, karl_fast, librarything, mefeedia, metadata_ecologies, penntags, tagging, tagging_evolution, tags
A bunch of months ago, I started talking about the concept of a metada ecology of tags, advocating a middle ground between the pure democracy of bottom-up tagging and the empirical determinism of top-down controlled vocabularies. I was firmly convinced that our next step (as information architects and social software consultants) was merging and leveraging emerging and traditional tools to improve findability.
At the beginning of this discussion, the intention of reintroducing a structure layer above the flat tags’ set seemed a weird and sloppy direction. At the end, people wanted simple, intuitive tools. What can be simpler than a weighted list?
Anyway, having reached an astonishing level of penetration in the consumer market with tagging, the limits of flat folksonomies have became evident: tag clouds are not scalable and thus not so functional for the organization of large content sets (a few hundred posts are enough).
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!
The structure I’m talking about is basically made of:
- Tag clusters/bundles
- Hierarchical tags
- Faceted Tags
- Advanced navigation (tag intersection, union, etc,)
- Tag variations (plurals, synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, holonyms,meronyms)
A more detailed description of similar thougths on my posts The Evolution of Social Tagging and Folksonomies 2.0 - The Chaotic Order
and in my presentation at this year Italian IA Summit Social Distributed Classification.
Tag clusters are widespread and already used in a number of softwares (del.icio.us and flickr to name a few) with good results. Tags can be introduced eliticing users’ behavior at different levels of complexity.
What about other points? Is there any site that is applying this concepts to tagging? Can they be used at the same time?
The answer to the last question is yes and I’m not the only one thinking this as I’ll show you in a moment.
During these months, a few interesting tagging ecologies have been presented in real world applications. Here is my personal list (please let me know if you have more and better examples):
- Mefeedia (facets + tags)
- RawSugar (hierarchical tags and clusters)
- Etsy (facets, categories and tags)
- Healthline (categories+tags)
- LibraryThing and PennTags (hierarchical subject headings + tags)
- WineLog (facets+tags)
Mefeedia (from Peter Van Dijck) is chronologically the first example of structured tagging. Editors create mutually exclusive facets and users assign tags to facets. The strenght of editors and users together to make large tagclouds more browsable and tags meaning more understandable.
RawSugar is a great social bookmarking tool (disclosure: I’m freely helping them with ideas from time to time). It’s a sort of del.icio.us on steroids, with a powerful blogging integration tools, ajax and a hierarchical organization of tags. The result is a forest of tag trees than can be used to support wayfinding both in search and navigation. Frank Smadja is doing a wonderful job there!
I wrote on Etsy before in Facets are easy and love tagging. Etsy is a niche marketplace for handmade things where people can sell and buy often unique items at only a portion of Ebay fee. The most interesting part is that Etsy is providing a complete set of different access dimensions to their information trough amazing flashy visualization clues. These dimensions are implicitly Ranganathan facets for space, time, material, topic, colors, owners, etc. Another important innovation is mixing categories (a flat topic taxonomy) with user generated tags (used as sub categories).
Healthline is a medical search engine with web 2.0 features. Topics are organized in a thesaurus for a better navigation but you can also create news alerts and save search results with tags to help you sort the information you find.
LibraryThing (3M of books now) and PennTags let users catalogue and tag books. Here subject headings are shown side by side with people assigned tags. Again, you can browse using a top down approach or fly horizontally leveraging tags.
Finally, citing from Lifehacker, WineLog is a “collaborative wine rating, sharing and tagging site designed to help you keep a record of wines you’ve tried and discover new wines”. Wines are organized and can be browsed through facets (varieties, regions and wineries) and user submitted tags.
These examples are a good starting point but we can do a lot better. Different facets cannot be mixed, tags navigation is not always integrated with search while facets and tags are never provided at the same time. As a final note, synonyms and other variations are not covered (leaving out LibraryThing for synonyms only).
So the point is that we have early examples of advanced folksonomies usage but the better tools will smoothly mix social tagging, taxonomies and faceted classification in a trasparent way for final users to change the way we access information online.
In a time of attention scarcity and information overload, letting the right users find the right content could do the difference between a successfull initiave and a miserable failure.
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