PUBLIC MARKS from ycc2106 with tag folksonomy

Social search + tag gadgaets and hous supplies. This folksonomy is being tested to learn how the general public and museum users might help classify objects for each other - without the rigid structures of traditional museological taxonomies.

Tagging is a Ning app designed to solve the problem of synonyms in folksonomy. In a strict taxonomy we have a certain number of (usually mutually-exclusive) categories and subcategories.

Resource and links about Tags, Folksonomies and Social Bookmarking.

...To me the new killer app for the Internet should help me in working at any levels of abstraction. The higher the abstraction, the more volume of complexity and data I can handle. Also at any level of abstraction, I should be able to navigate between concepts that are visible at that level and observe new connections that were not apparent to me at a different abstraction. And when I want to dig deeper, it should help me in exploring more on that subject. At the lowest level of abstraction, it would resemble a browser. The mass of the content that is on the Internet will still be on HTML, which is doing a good job of capturing presentation information, and a browser is suitable to view this. In short this application should act as a seamless extension to mind and help me in generating ideas by creating new connection between concepts about which I have little or no previous knowledge by leveraging the collective intelligence of humanity.

To investigate what words and phrases people associate with Web 2.0, I took a close look at two popular Web 2.0-ish articles and noted what tags people stored them under in del.icio.us. The first post was Adam Rifkin's fantastic Weblications. It currently has 99 people linking to it on del.icio.us and here is an excel chart showing the top tags:

* Misspelt tags (e.g., libary, libray) * Badly encoded tags, such as unlikely compound word groupings (e.g.,TimBernersLee) * Tags that do not follow convention in issues such as case and number; singular versus plural form (e.g., apple, apples) * Personal tags that are without meaning to the wider community (e.g., mydog) * Single-use tags that appear only once in the database. (e.g., billybobsdog)

In order to understand how we can make tags more searchable it is important to understand users and why they submit certain tags. At this time, little is known about the decision-making process behind tag selection, and quantitative data is relatively scarce. One useful approach might be to examine users' motivations when adding tags, see why they decide on particular words, observe how many tags they add and compare how the same items are classified by different users. It might also be helpful to see how feedback affects tag use and how users modify tags in the light of the behaviour of others. However, such studies take time and resources.