Buzzword Bingo 2.0.1
Andy Stevens, managing partner at Unique Digital, aims to dissect buzzwords like “folksonomy” currently circling cyberspace…
At Unique we have been taking a look at some of the new and exciting developments in the internet. They tend to be classified as Web 2.0, just one of the endless list of new coinages that internet people seem to love minting. Let’s take folksonomy, and its associated terms tag clouds and collabularies, as a start.
Folksonomy, a conjunction of folk and taxonomy, is a classic example of Web 2.0. It refers to a collaborative system of categorising content, where any viewer of your data can suggest words which they feel summarises or identify it. So if I upload a picture of a kitten, on the photo upload website flickr, I can not only put in the obvious descriptor of cat, kitten etc, but also qualities such as tabby, tortoiseshell, and subjective judgements such as cute, underexposed, fuzzy. I do this so that people can find my picture.
If another user browses the websites database, they can, I hope, find my picture, admire it, and maybe give it the ultimate internet kudos of linking to it or sending it on to other people. In another example on del.icio.us, any viewer can also describe my picture in any terms they see fit as well. This practice applies to all sorts of content online, be it blogs, bookmarks, record collections, or anything else.
Why would anyone do this? Well, in part it’s like so many phenomena of the internet – it reflects two basic human characteristics; voyeurism and egocentrism. You can compare what you have with other people, and to try to get other people to praise your stuff.
What identifies it as a truly new thing however, is that it is user controlled. It isn’t Yahoo! categorising websites by employing teams of surfers (as their directory currently is produced) and it isn’t a fiendishly clever algorithm looking at links and content on a page to determine relevance (as exemplified by Google). It is people deciding what words sum up the content you are looking at.
This is obviously not an empirical system: cat and cats are two different tags, so are feline and kitty and puss. With all this margin for personal choice, you’d think it wouldn’t work, but when testing the principle I found there are over 9,000 images on flickr that have been tagged with the term ‘nose’.
You get some strange photos, but they are all generally noses. Part of this is due to the human characteristics mentioned earlier – you might have an idiosyncratic vocabulary, but if you want to post your photos, you want other people to find them, and so you choose what you consider to be tags that will be relevant to the mainstream. It’s a sort of positive social pressure.
Tag clouds take the principle of folksonomy, and turn it into a visual manifestation of the most popular tags. The more people using the tag word, the bigger font it gets in the visually representation, while the list remains in alphabetical order. Interestingly, because flickr is an American website, you see vacation in large type, but not its British synonym ‘holiday’.
Questions remain over the scalability of tagging – if everybody is doing it, whether it works at all. For instance, the main cloud tag on flickr is actually quite unengaging. However, what seems to be happening is that tags develop some degree of internal order, depending on what is being categorised.
The meaning of each tag word starts to assume multiple specific definitions, depending on the context, and to get the most out of a collectively categorised site you will need to learn what tags produce the results you want (for example, ‘gnarly’ means one thing to a skateboarder, and something else to everyone else). The tags that assume this function are known as a collabulary, and are no different to the code words that all social groups develop to establish a sense of identity and internal cohesion.
Like the other developments that will follow in this series, folksonomy is SO Web 2.0, darling. It doesn’t cost very much, it is based on a very simple process, it is a novel application of data rather than published content, it empowers the user rather than the service provider, it mimics the way people rather than machines behave, and it is based on peer judgements and interactions.
In upcoming articles we will look at the phenomenon of blogs, Google, and Open Source software, but in all instances it will be apparent that our understanding of the internet over the past decade is no longer applicable, and that there is a whole raft of new opportunities out there for savvy operators, be they marketers or people with a huge collection of photos.