Folksonomy (Tagging)

[Yankidank]

Most of you have probably never heard the word "folksonomy", but I'm sure most of us have seen the technology on many popular websites. Pretty much, folksonomy is using tags for categorizing items like how Flickr tags photos. I brought this up on another post because someone wanted to allow users to create sub categories for individual posts on Pligg, I replied that a tagging system would work best for this person because it would not clutter up the category area and it would help users find articles more relevant to what they want. I found a great article about folksonomy here which I am going to paste below because anyone interested in tagging should probably read this. After reading what's below let me know if you are interested in having folksonomy built into Pligg.

Example Sites:

• del.icio.us - a social bookmarking system
• Flickr - a photo publishing / sharing site
• Technorati Tags - a recent feature added to the popular blog search engine
• MetaFilter Tags - another recently added feature to the original group blog.
• TagSurf - an experimental forum based on tags rather than the standard way of organizing topics

How does it Work?

The easiest way to find out how tags work and get a handle on the whole folksonomy thing is to go use del.icio.us - Follow these steps and you'll soon be up to speed:

1. Create an account
2. Follow all the instructions, it's dead simple. Then check your email and follow the link
3. Login to your account
4. You'll arrive at the about page
5. Where you will then be able to post a link
6. Follow the forms instructions, it's not hard

Now, when you filled in the form you would have given your bookmark some space seperated tags right? You can see my bookmarks here - notice that some of the entries have 2 tags? That bookmark will fall under both of those tags - on the right, you can see the tags i've created or added to so far. The really, really neat thing about this site is that each tag, and each user have an RSS Feed - slap it in your aggregator and keep up with posts to specific topics, such as Search [rss feed]
And by the way, del.icio.us has about 30,000 registered geeks so some of those tagged rss feeds are an absolute goldmine of information. For more, see this interview with creator Joshua Schachter

What Makes Tags Important?

Simply put, tags are important because they allow your users to generate content and classify that content in their own unique way. To illustrate this, let me tell you about a conversation I had with a TW member last week.
Imagine that you have a website about hobbies (the blandest example i could come up with heh..) and you have lots of users that like fishing. So, when users input data, be that blog posts, photos, reviews or anything you might dream up, they will invariably tag their posts with fishing right? Well, yes and no. Some of your users will tag thier posts with angling or yet others may use 2 or more tags such as fishing vacation or holiday fishing or fishing weekend with me?
So, imagine using that user generated metadata in the way that your info is organized and presented - think url's for one thing...

• Fishing - 300 posts
• Angling - 20 posts
• Fishing Vacation - 100 posts
• Holiday Fishing - 40 posts
• Fishing Weekend - 200 posts

and further imagine creating menus and pages based on those categories. By allowing the most popular tags to "float to the top" you can assign more importance, more link weight etc etc to the heaviest tags - just check out the side navigation on del.icio.us for a practical, if simple example. And don't forget the urls of course:

• somesite.com/fishing/
• somesite.com/fishing-weekend/

“Perhaps the most important strength of a folksonomy is that it directly reflects the vocabulary of users.”

Oh boy, starting to get the picture? The heavier tags directly reflect the heaviest searches, the most popular keywords people use to find subjects of interest! Now, if you can't see a value in that, your a lost cause :-)
Add to the above concept the fact that along with creating a grass roots, bottom up classification structure that can be used in many, many creative ways for search marketing you also have all of those wonderful misspeelings and mistakes - Not too many people search for "fising" - but it does happen doesn't it? - You get all of the benefits of genuine, bonafide human error, misconception and general weirdness that is soooo dificult, if not impossible to accurately generate by yourself.

Where Might you be able to Actually Use Tagging?

At present, tagging and folksonomies are brand spanking new. And they've not been used in any particularly comercial ways except for perhaps Flickr who appear to be grooming for a buy out - Right now these things are firmly in the hands of the academics and geeks, with not much to inspire the blood thirsty internet marketer other than the general idea. Use your imagination though, there are **** loads of ways to make this work.
Essentially, if you can solicit user input, you can most likely tag it - and in some scenarios that's going to pay off in a large way.

Additional Links:

• Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata
• Can social tagging overcome barriers to content classification?
• Wikipedia: Folksonomy
• Social consequences of social tagging
• it's the social network, stupid!
• Folksonomies are a forced move: A response to Liz
• Folksonomies? How about Metadata Ecologies?
• folksonomies + controlled vocabularies
• issues of culture in ethnoclassification/folksonomy
• Folksonomy is better for cultural values: A response to danah
• questions of classification (a response to Clay)
• Tags != folksonomies && Tags != Flat name spaces
• What do tags mean?

General Blog Post and Speculation / Commentary

• Semantic Tagging
• By their tags shall ye know them
• Tag, you're it! - VC interest
• the difference between Technorati Tags and Del.icio.us and PubSub and google.
• A del.icio.us interview
• As Sites Add Tags, Tagtextual Advertising Will Follow
• Taggle - A Google for Tags?
• Tag me
• Tagging at Technorati, Flickr and Del.icio.us
• Big-time app uses the a/@rel attribute, boosting "folksonomy" development
• Technorati Takes Tags Global
• Technorati tags: Take 2
• Tapping into Tags
• Tap Into the Flickrgeist
• A Self-Referential Demonstration of the Power of the Del.icio.us Folksonomy
• Folksonomy — One Man’s Experiment
• Tags and Tagging

[Pentarix]

absolutely, it sounds awesome and something I'd definetly use!

[Yankidank]

Some Digg-like sites using tags:

• http://wink.com/
• http://tailrank.com/
• http://spinspy.com/

[cmont]

Have you check FreeTag?, FreeTag is a Tagging / Folksonomy module for PHP/MySQL applications, this module is used by Upcoming.org and eatlunch.at if you want examples.

[Yankidank]

thanks for the link and examples cmont, FreeTag might be useful.

[Rousehouse]

You know, initially I was a bit skeptical about the idea; I guess I was stuck in the Digg paradigm. But, I've got to say that you convinced me! The more I think about it, the more I like it.

[podigle]

Hi Yankidank,

As I have said in other posts, I think both categories and tags can happily coexist. As your posting illustrates, tagging can add some very beneficial aspects to pligg that will only enhance the user experience.

Nice article too by the way.

podigle.

[cmont]

The original project Meneame.net has already inserted the tagging system , now you can insert diferents tag separeted by comas in the submit form.
In the homepage you can see two new buttons: the "etiquetas"(which means tags) and the "blogs" buttons.

Sorry if my english sucks but I'm from Chile and my first lenguage is Spanish.

Please Update the code as soon as possible(ASAP ).