Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification

Michael E. Ryanryaninteractive@gmail.com@ryaninteractive

UPA Boston User Experience Conference 2009

2Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification

About Me

3Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification

Where do you put this book in a taxonomy?

(Takahashi, 2009)

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Oreilly Media – Math?

(O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2009)

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Amazon’s classification

What terms describe this book?

(Amazon.com, 2009)

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What terms describe this book?

Tags Amazon users have attached to this book

(Amazon.com, 2009)

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What is a Folksonomy?

The term “folksonomy” was created by Thomas Vander Wal on

a listserve in July 2004. Term combines folk and taxonomy.

“Folksonomy is the result of personal free tagging of information and objects… for one's own retrieval… The value in this external tagging is derived from people using their own vocabulary and adding explicit meaning, which may come from inferred understanding of the information/object”

(Vander Wal, 2007b)

8Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification

Tagging Model

Tagger > Tag > Object

9Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification

Aggregation

• Tags are compiled in aggregation

• Finds most popular tags for an object

• Connects tags to multiple objects

• Finds most popular tags on a website

• Connects tags and objects by inference

Usability

Human Factors

UX

(Smith, 2008)

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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification

Pivot browsing

(Amazon.com, 2009)

(Rosenfeld & Morville, 2007)

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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification

Search and Filter

Users can add or subtract tags to filter results

(Amazon.com, 2009)

(Golder & Huberman, 2005)

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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification

Tag counts to rank popularity

Number of people who tagged

(Delicious, 2009)

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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification

Tag cloud

(Flickr, 2009)

(Rainie, 2007)

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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification

Exercise

Assign tags (keywords) to these objects. These could be for everyone or just for you.

(Amazon.com, 2009)

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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification

Amazon’s tags

(Amazon.com, 2009)

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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification

How do people tag?

Individual and Social retrieval

• Literal descriptive

• Personal abstract

• Personal categorization

• Social benefit

(Golder & Huberman, 2005)

(Vander Wal, 2007a)

(Smith, 2008)

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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification

Who is tagging?

2007 PEW Internet & American Life Project survey

• 28% of Americans (42 million) online have tagged

• 7% (10 million) tag daily.

• Americans who tag tend to be under 40 and have a higher education and income.

• Race/ethnicity of the taggers was reported as:– 26% White, non-Hispanic

– 36% Black, non-Hispanic

– 33% English-speaking Hispanic

(Rainie, 2007)

(Vander Wal, 2007a)

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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification

How businesses can use tagging

• Validate or identify gaps in a taxonomy

• Additional metadata enhances findability

• Encourage tagging by making it easy, fun & social

(Trant, 2006)

(Smith, 2008)

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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification

Problems with tagging

Messy metadata

• User-controlled vocabulary can help

• 2006 Trant study only needed to remove 6.7% of terms

• Problem decreases as tag usage grows

(Trant, 2006)

(Smith, 2008)

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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification

Tag abuse

• Give taggers as much freedom as possible to encourage use, but need to protect users from abuse

– Remove/disable expletives and hate speech

– Allow users to flag tags and taggers

• Spam

• Vocal Minority

• Negative Tagging

(Smith, 2008)

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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification

Negative Tagging

Expect some negative tags for objects. Best to allow this as long as it is not abusive to users.

(Amazon.com, 2009)

(Smith, 2008)

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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification

For more info

Gene Smith - Tagging: People-powered metadata for the social web (voices that matter)

www.personalinfocloud.com Thomas Vander Wal’s Blog

ryaninteractive@gmail.com@ryaninteractive

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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification

Other Manga Guides

(No Starch Press, 2009)

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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification

Thank You

Questions?

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Michael Ryan, May 2009Folksonomies: Diverse, Democratic and Evolving Classification

Appendix A: References• Amazon.com. (2009). http://www.amazon.com

• Delicious. (2009). http://www.delicious.com/

• Flickr. (2009). http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/

• Golder, S. & Huberman, B. A. (2005) The structure of collaborative tagging systems. Technical report, In-formation Dynamics Lab, HP Labs. http://arxiv.org/ftp/cs/papers/0508/0508082.pdf

• No Starch Press (2009) http://nostarch.com/manga/

• O'Reilly Media, Inc. (2009). http://oreilly.com/pub/topic/math

• Rainie, L. (2007). 28% of online Americans have used the Internet to tag content. http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Tagging.pdf

• Rosenfeld, L., & Morville, P. (2007). Information architecture for the World Wide Web (3rd ed.). Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly.

• Smith, G. (2008). Tagging: People-powered metadata for the social web (voices that matter) Berkeley, CA: New Riders.

• Takahashi, S. (2009). The manga guide to statistics. San Francisco: No Starch Press.

• Trant, J. (2006). Social classification and folksonomy in art museums: Early data from the steve.museum tagger prototype. In Proceedings of the 17th SIG Classification Research Workshop, 2006. http://www.archimuse.com/papers/asist-CR-steve-0611.pdf

• Vander Wal, T. (2007a, January 31). Pew research on tagging. Personal InfoCloud. http://www.personalinfocloud.com/2007/01/pew_research_on.html

• Vander Wal, T. (2007b, February 2). Folksonomy coinage and definition. Off the Top. http://vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html