Beyond Folksonomies at SXSW

Here are my raw notes for beyond folksonomies: knitting tag clouds for grandma:

from pidgen to creole

tags popularized by (delicious, flickr, technorati)

hodder on usability problems

a lot of web 2.0 sites, hoping people will fill in all the info, but interfaces poorly done … half-done systems because others got critical mass (which makes them interesting)

• flickr = great interface
• delicious = new features just today?

swedlow mentions goals: wants people to become comfortable discovering, sharing, making meaning

think about tools/features/usaiblity

• problem: synonyms, term drift
• ironic solution: rigid taxonomies (hah)

what are people really trying to do?

question (bill anderson): i’m just having fun - it doesn’t bother me. i don’t care about most of that stuff (paraphrase)

(emergent issue)

question: analogy to designing object oriented systems (classification), we need better tools to let us refactor

swedlow: problem: that’s a lot of work and we’re all lazy
comment: i guess i’m just obsessive compulsive
swedlow: that’s great, but the other 99.5% is lazy

question: tags are made by individuals, we’re not building community up

(but [me] doesn’t delicious tell you what tags other people have used? … this is a great conversation BUT it feels kind of obvious, protests too much)

Hodder discusses Dabble, video tagging. there are 98 commercial video hosting sites, 15 noncommercial. about half have tagging…. about 53% of videos have tags

distinction between implicit and automated tagging: implicit meaning aided, automatic tending to reinforce groupthink

Liz (finally - that ghod) jumps in (and says the new headset mics are incredibly uncomfortable), asks how many of you use tagging tools?

80% of hands go up

you are not like most people

too many places

i’m not going to use shadows - my links are on delicious

interop problem

(mention tagsonomy… dria’s article)

comment from audience: real existing folksonomies example: each person’s folder structure

(my thought: yes, but folder vs. tag, folders are hierarchical… gmail breakthrough… search don’t sort = i do that in outlook now)

new word: “emergently”

comment: iTunes folksonomy/tags are “political” (example: they put downtempo under ambient but “ambient doesn’t have a beat and downtempo does”)

question: best practices for tags UI?

hodder mentions i-tags.

tags: sxsw2006, sxsw