[Linganth] Folsonomy

Fri Feb 4 02:50:10 UTC 2005

I've been using these services with a visual anthropology class I am
teaching this semester. It is great because anyone can tag photos and
links with the course name+number and then automatically share those
links and photos with the rest of the class! The way people classify
things is also, itself, an interesting subject for anthropological
investigation. This Guardian article is one of the most clearly
articulated explanations of how these services work and why they are
exciting, so I thought I'd share it with everyone.

It would be well worth creating tags with the name of the list that
everyone can use to share links and photos! I've already started here
with the link for this article! (See below.)

http://del.icio.us/tag/linganth

http://del.icio.us/tag/easianth

Cheers,

Kerim

_______________________________________
P. KERIM FRIEDMAN
			Visiting Assistant Professor
			Anthropology, Haverford College
			kerim.friedman at oxus.net
			http://kerim.oxus.net
_______________________________________

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1403974,00.html>

Tag team

An innovative photo organising service is taking the web by storm. Jim
McClellan reports

Thursday February 3, 2005
The Guardian

It is hard to avoid the buzz online about Flickr, a photo
organising/sharing service yet to celebrate its first birthday. In
tones echoing the optimism of early 90s internet culture, enthusiasts
say the service makes possible new kinds of conversation and community.
For others, it shows how the efforts of individuals can be harnessed to
help organise the internet.

Flickr's growth has matched this excitement. Though still in beta, it
has 245,000 members, and is growing at 5-10% a week, according to
co-founder Caterina Fake. "We have 3.5m photos online - members upload
up to 60,000 new photos a day."

Digital photography is hugely popular and online storage and
organisation is one solution to the image overload many snappers
experience. But other sites offer similar services. So why has this
Vancouver-based operation generated such excitement?

Flickr is well designed and easy to use, but its popularity is probably
because it permits what Fake calls "a rich, sharing experience". The
tools it gives users - in particular the ability to "tag" photos
(describe their content with a key word) and then, via those tags,
share images with others, have unleashed the social potential of
digital photos.

Fake credits del.icio.us, the "social bookmarks" site, as a key
influence, because it was the first site to really show what could
happen when users were allowed to create tags to organise information
online themselves then share it with others. The initial attraction of
del.icio.us is storing bookmarks online, so you can access them
wherever you are. But, extending an idea developed by SocialText for
its wikis, del.icio.us also encourages users to "tag" bookmarks (for
example with key words such as "poetry" or "apple"). This helps
individuals organise personal links. But because links are shared
across the site, a user can see links stored by other users under tags
they use.

So del.icio.us is an easy way for individuals to pool their online
searching to find more useful information. Launched in December 2003,
the site is popular, says founder Joshua Schachter, "because it's
useful to an individual user, but the 'multitudinous individuality' it
permits allows for wonderful discovery across users".

The same goes for Flickr. It's easy to upload photos taken with your
digital camera or cameraphone. You can choose to keep them private or
make them publicly available. Tagging images helps you organise your
collection, but also share it. So searching on the tag "cat" will call
up all publicly available photos with that tag.

More usefully, Flickr's tags (and the ability to form groups around
them) make it easy for family and friends to share photos from weddings
or other events. "You can also get creative and make group scrapbooks
around a theme," says Fake. Hence "Flickr fads" - photos created to fit
certain popular tags, like the thousands of photos tagged "squared
circle", all interpreting the basic guideline (a circle framed by a
square) in different ways.

In these cases, tags bring people together and channel their
creativity. Flickr fads can take on an activist edge - the "fuh2" tag
pools photos of people "giving the finger" to Humvees, the gas guzzling
cars favoured by celebrities. Tags also collate newsworthy images - the
"tsunami" tag hosts a powerful collection of pictures taken by ordinary
individuals.

For Clay Shirky, a social software pundit, "Flickr and del.icio.us
scale beautifully from individual utility (save this photo/link)
through community (share this photo or link with family, friends, or
colleagues) to public accessibility (share this photo or link with
anyone and everyone). The personal utility gets people using the
service, and the communal utility means the value of the service grows
over time."

In other words, they work because they let individuals do something
useful to them first and foremost. Social network effects only emerge
later. This is different from first generation social networking
services such as Friendster (which let users link to friends, and
friends of friends), according to Erik Benson of the Robot Coop, which
created 43 Things. This lets people share (and tag) personal goals
online with others, in the hope that that will help people actually
achieve them. "We were influenced by Flickr, del.icio.us and others -
but none are only about creating a list of friends. They're about
sharing a particular set of experiences and making stuff happen."

For Caterina Fake, this focus helps Flickr avoid the "friend inflation"
of standalone social networking sites. "Someone befriends you, you
don't want to say no. So it becomes about having the most friends. On
Flickr, the only people you add as friends are those you want to let
see your friends-only and family-only photos, and whose photos you want
to see in your aggregated photos."

Flickr is an incredibly social site - people form groups and links by
adding notes and new tags to each other's pictures. For some, the site
has achieved such ubiquity that they use it to communicate via images.
Whenever Fake flies overseas, she sends photos of the baggage claim
area to Flickr on arrival so her mother knows she is safe. She mentions
Flickr users who took a cameraphone to the birth of their baby and
shared the experience with friends via the service. "It's like tuning
into the personal TV station of friends."

Flickr taps into the social power of digital photos more effectively
than one-to-one picture messaging. "No one who's seen a group pore over
a photo album was surprised that photos are good for group
communications," observes Shirky. But cameraphone companies "designed
their systems to force one-to-one use. Carriers are committed to only
creating uses of the phone that match their 'one transaction, one fee'
model. But for all the social uses of mobile phones, the first thing
the service has to do is get the data away from the smothering embrace
of the carriers and out on to the internet, where you can build real
group applications."

For most users, Flickr is just a fun/useful service. But for some
bloggers, it (and del.ico.us) has sparked a debate about how best to
organise data online. Blogger Thomas Vander Wal coined the term
"folksonomy" - a conflation of "folk" and "taxonomy", to refer to the
"bottom-up" organisational categories that emerge when individuals tag
or describe information and images and those tags are pooled.

Shirky and others have argued that folksonomies that use tags -
"user-created metadata" - are the only cost-effective way to generate
order in large dynamic systems such as the net. Critics insist this
will never yield the clarity of controlled classifications administered
by professionals. Each approach has strengths. Folksonomies bring
structure to the chaos of the net, but you'd probably be happier if
your doctor used a more controlled database when it came to figuring
out if you had a life threatening disease.

The folksonomy discussion inspired David Sifry, founder and chief
executive of blog aggregator/search site Technorati to launch its
"Tags" service. Searching on a particular tag (eg China) calls up all
links loaded under that tag on del.icio.us, all photos using it from
Flickr and all blog posts categorised under that word. Sifry admits
that categories that bloggers choose for their posts are broader than
tags. But users can add tags to their posts on top of their categories,
and he suggests that people might start to change the way they
categorise blog posts to take advantage of Technorati Tags. For
example, an Irish blogger has suggested that if his compatriots all
tagged their posts with "irish blog", it would generate an Irish group
blog on the relevant Technorati page, without anyone having to do
anything more.

These "self-organising effects" aren't always benign. Some bloggers
showed that the "teens" tag on Tech norati brought together innocent
photos from Flickr and links to pornographic sites. That problem has
been fixed and Sifry says he is working on ways to deal with this issue
and listening carefully to the online community. "Technology alone
isn't going to solve the problem," he says, suggesting that perhaps
social networks might work together to filter or tag objectionable
content. Flickr allows users to tag images that might cause offence and
these aren't publicly available.

In a way, Technorati's tags show how Flickr might extend its influence.
Shirky says it is really "a service with a web front-end" and that
people will build sites that use it in interesting ways.

So will the site (and tagging) continue to grow, or is it, as some
critics argue, too "geeky" for the mainstream? "Over the years, I've
heard that email, IM, Geocities, weblogs, and file-sharing networks
would remain niche because they were too hard for 'regular' people to
use," says Shirky. "The people saying those things don't understand
that, for people who swim in technology (which is to say people under
30), these kinds of services are obvious bordering on intuitive."

He argues that as more people use Flickr, individuals will find new
ways to tag images. The future won't always be easy for Flickr. "Costs
will go up, pioneer members will complain about newcomers, newcomers
will complain about pioneers, it will slow down when everyone is
uploading this Friday's crop of 'Look! Another margarita!' shots." But
what you need to remember, he adds, is that these are "the kind of
problems you get with success".

Links

http://flickr.com

http://del.icio.us

www.corante.com/many

http://vanderwal.net/random/

www.technorati.com/tag

http://masl.to/?N2CE15D5A

www.shirky.com

www.43things.com