“Taggers Block”
April 5th, 2006I read this post by Bradley Horowitz with enthusiastic glee. Using Flickr as an example, he discusses the benefits of the clustering mechanisms in place at the giant photo sharing site:
“In the great taxonomy/folksonomy debate, dewey-decimal fans generally invoke semantic ambiguity as a place where tagging will breakdown. Stewart invoked these illustrative examples in his blog post that introduced the Flickr clustering feature. For instance, the word “turkey” has several different senses - turkey the bird, turkey the food, and Turkey the country.”
“Forcing a user to resolve this ambiguity at data entry time would be a drag, and we’d likely see a huge dropoff in the amount of user metadata that we collect. (Moreover, we really couldn’t. As pointed out before, tags must be allowed to take on personal meaning - “turkey” might be the name of my school’s mascot, e.g. the Tarrytown Turkeys, or a pejorative term I apply to a bad snapshot…) What Flickr can and does do, is provide an ipso facto means of resolving this ambiguity and browsing the data: Flickr’s clustery goodness.”
“So check out the turkey clusters. Flickr uses the co-occurance of tags to cluster terms. In other words photos with the tags “turkey” and “stuffing” tend to be about the food, ”turkey” and “mosque” tend to be about the country, and “turkey” and “feather” about the bird.”
I enjoyed reading the post because companies continue to use the content from their users as a focal point for solving problems. We do that at PubSub with our Community List rankings (the more links [and the more "influcence those links have], the higher the rank). It’s not based on any arbitrary basis, but the power of the group to place an individual blogger higher. It’s a pretty neat “Wisdom of the Crowds” approach that is doing the same thing (in theory) that Flickr is doing with clustering.
Which brings me to the “two-way street” catalog theory yet again (something I started writing about after I became enthralled with online readers advisory - I have too many hobbies!). By allowing end users to tag book entries (see UPenn), they just might be making their catalog “smarter” and their materials more findable. Heck, our users can’t find books on there anyway, we might as well try nailing as many Jello’s to the wall as possible.
One related note. In my “Don’t Default to Google” post from last week, I did not mean that libraries shouldn’t make their catalogs as easy as Google. They should. 50 Gazillion users can’t be wrong when it comes to ease of use. I meant it in purely research terms and stand fully by my remarks. Defaulting to Google is like having cereal every morning because it tastes good, even though you know that there are better choices of food that may be just require more work to make.