Folksonomy => Taxonomy
Thursday, November 11, 2004, 12:46 PM - Tech
After mulling over the research from yesterday, I've some thoughts.

1. A folksonomy is not a taxonomy, it is a flat classification system while a taxonomy is a highly structured hierarchy of terms and their interrelations. To compare the two directly is incorrect.
2. A folksonomy can stand on its own, or it can be the collection of terms as the basis for a taxonomy.
3. As Warner points out, a thesarus is the intermediate step between a classification and a taxonomy. In my experience, the difference between a classification and a thesarus is that the user provides the synonyms in a classification and the infoworker makes them explicit in the thesarus.
4. I'm struck by the passion of Clay and Cory both in favor of folksonomy and against taxonomy. I understand their support of the first, being social software mavens and all. I don't understand their venom for the latter.


Folksonomies
Wednesday, November 10, 2004, 03:27 PM - Tech
Some links on the topic of folksonomy:
Ideas Bazaar: emic and etic
Many2Many: Clay Shirky: canonical and a priori vs. contextual and a prosteriori
peterme.com: Peter Merholz
peer pressure
Designweenie: James Spahr: managing classification terms for portfolios
headshift: One thing's for sure: social tagging is a revelation for anybody who has sat through days of agonising taxonomy design with client organisations who are unsure of their users' real needs.
Infoworld: Jon Udell: abandon the taxonomy
alex wright: semanitic web: Fast at the bottom, slow at the top
Cory Doctorow: Metacrap: 7 reasons why not
geodog: they turn out to be great ways of following a conversation on the web. I display the RSS feed for my Del.icio.us subscriptions and it updates hourly with what other people have bookmarked about topics that interest me
For a term that is only a couple of months old, it's hot -- over 9,000 hits on google

Net result: information architecture is a bitch, especially computer-mediated information gathering. Flat classification schemes are valuable but depend on human pattern matching to work. Hierarchical taxonomies are valuable because they are (hopefully) unambiguous but are inflexible. Obvious take-away: there's need for both. But how and when?

More here: Amy Warner on controlled vocabularies in general.


social webbing
Tuesday, November 9, 2004, 04:11 PM - Tech
I've been looking at del.icio.us again, prompted by this post at Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends blog.

del.icio.us is a "social bookmarks manager", a "free social software web service for sharing web bookmarks". People enter their bookmarks and add tags, or keywords, for each bookmark. Then they can see their own list from any internet machine. The social part is that you can also see the bookmarks which other people have entered using the same tags.

At first blush, the neatest function of del.icio.us is the bottoms-up creation of a "folkonomy" of web content in contrast to a top-down "taxonomy". The categorization is done by those that read and need the meaning of the content and not imposed preconceptions of those who create the content.

But it only goes so far. There's the issue of the power law effect, where the a-list content creators dominate, to consider. There's also the issue of the proper role of expertise organizing what can become recursive grass-roots babble.


Blogging
Tuesday, November 9, 2004, 03:41 PM - Politics
Two cogent takes on the good and bad of election blogging:
But the ability to transmit words, we learned during the Citizens Band radio fad of the 70’s, does not mean that any knowledge is being passed along. One of the verdicts rendered by election night 2004 is that, given their lack of expertise, standards and, yes, humility, the chances of the bloggers replacing mainstream journalism are about as good as the parasite replacing the dog it fastens on.
Blogging As Typing, Not Journalism

But Craig Newmark, of craigslist, said the challenge for blogs and social-networking sites is to find a way to get the millions of people they attract to go beyond the echo chamber of the Internet.
Blogs Counter Political Plottings



Homegrown Terror
Tuesday, November 9, 2004, 03:22 PM - Politics
An interesting observation on the locus of terror:
Ashcroft's Justice Department has shown almost no interest in what was, until the calamitous events of September 11, the primary domestic terrorism threat--the white nationalist, anti-government militia movement and its corollaries with theocratically driven terrorism, primarily abortion-related assassinations and bombings. ...

Apart from the one-off attack in September 2001 by 19 young foreigners, most of them Saudis, the country's most deeply entrenched and most persistent domestic terrorist threat has come from within its own borders and at the hands of its own citizens. It would be folly to believe that the American terrorist underground, after 15 years of sustained and bloody action, has somehow just given up and disappeared.
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
On one hand, the point is taken that the current administration in particular doesn't want to alienate the passions of the domestic right-wing by coming down on activists, even those in the extreme. On the other, past administrations haven't done a lot with this. Also, it is disingenuous to dismiss the 1993 WTC bombing and the terrorist attacks globally.



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