Tags, tag cloud, social tagging, collaborative tagging, social classification

IDEA N^o 76

FOLKSONOMIES

One of the defining aspects of Web 2.0 is that users can tailor their online experience. A core part of this involves tagging. Nobody tells you what tags to use. You can make them up. And the more people who tag, the more relevant the tagging becomes. This is folksonomy.

The term ‘folksonomy’, taxonomy by folk, was coined in 2004 by Thomas Vander Wal. It describes the act of tagging web content, such as pictures, articles, music and webpages. Unlike folksonomy’s etymological parent, taxonomy, tags can be assigned without any fixed hierarchy. The most pertinent terms naturally rise to the top, creating a more intuitive online experience.

Vander Wal identifies two types of folksonomy: broad and narrow. A narrow folksonomy occurs when there are only a few people tagging an object. A broad folksonomy is constructed by many different users. Some tags are used frequently, but the majority are peripheral. At the head of the distribution, they tend towards a consensus. If one person applies the tag ‘Net Art’ to an object, it does not have much value; if many people use this tag, then it is likely that the content is related to Net Art. That is not to say the long tail of less frequently used tags has no value. Obscure tags allow niche audiences to find content that they might not otherwise discover.

A platform that employs a narrow folksonomy is Flickr. With more than 50 million members and over 6 billion images, the need for search filters is obvious. A tagging system distributes the task over the entire population of Flickr users, and so the vast number of images become useful data at little or no cost. The reason it is a narrow folksonomy is because only the person who uploads a photograph can tag it. Conversely, Pinterest employs a broad folksonomy – anybody can tag any image.

In the tradition of the Web, folksonomies are hugely democratic. The power is in the hands of the users. The benefits of this anarchic, crowdsourced system of classification are perhaps surprising. Not only are folksonomies highly efficient, more comprehensive and more accurate than traditional methods, but their great strength is that the vocabulary of users is built in.■

A tag cloud of the authors of the 100 best books, as proposed by 100 writers from 54 different countries, compiled and organized in 2002 by the Norwegian Book Club.