Flickr and "folksonomies"

Salon has an article about online photo sharing services like Flickr. The innovative thing about Flickr is not that it lets you put pictures online, or lets others see them; what's new is that it allows other people to annotate pictures and add keywords. The paradigmatic example is wedding reception pictures: you put up a bunch of pictures, and attendees can go online and identify themselves and others.

This is interesting for a couple reasons. First, metadata is notoriously hard to create and maintain. It isn't necessarily very hard to add to a picture, but it's exceptionally tedious. Flickr opens the door to collective, open source-like energy with photo metatagging.

Second, Flickr doesn't have a formal taxonomy of tags that you apply to photos; people create their own, generating what Thomas Vander Wal calls "folksonomies," bottom-up taxonomies. As Gene Smith explains,

[In systems like] Furl, Flickr and Del.icio.us... people classify their pictures/bookmarks/web pages with tags (e.g. wedding), and then the most popular tags float to the top (e.g. Flickr's tags or Del.icio.us on the right).... [F]olksonomies can work well for certain kinds of information because they offer a small reward for using one of the popular categories (such as your photo appearing on a popular page). People who enjoy the social aspects of the system will gravitate to popular categories while still having the freedom to keep their own lists of tags.

On the other hand, I can see a few reasons why a folksonomy would be less than ideal in a lot of cases:

• None of the current implementations have synonym control (e.g. "selfportrait" and "me" are distinct Flickr tags, as are "mac" and "macintosh" on Del.icio.us).
• Also, there's a certain lack of precision involved in using simple one-word tags--like which Lance are we talking about? (Though this is great for discovery, e.g. hot or Edmonton)
• And, of course, there's no heirarchy and the content types (bookmarks, photos) are fairly simple.

For indexing and library people, folksonomies are about as appealing as Wikipedia is to encyclopedia editors. Still, I think there's no denying that, their problems aside, there's some interesting stuff happening around them.

If you're not a subscriber, the Salon article's worth putting up with an ad to read.

Comments

[Rob]

Of the three issues that Van Der Wall identified with "folksonomies", at least the first one can be addressed, if not solved, by allowing individuals to propose synonyms and have the user base at large vote on whether something is a synonym or not.

This type of system is in use on (I believe) Music Brainz (musicbrainz.org) and Audioscrobbler (audioscrobbler.com) where requests to vote on synonyms are unobtrusive, but available for those who might like to help with the accuracy of the system.

Obviously, unlike music artists or track names, there is much more ambiguity in single word tags that can be about arbitrary subjects. Much of what determines synonymity is the context. However, it might prove to be of use nonetheless.

"selfportrait" and "me" are not entirely synonymous.

if i upload an image of myself that is not a "selfportrait" {perhaps someone else was using the camera}, "me" would still be appropriate.

there are better examples that articulate synonym control issues.

[kentsin]

I have been thinking this for some time already. When the amount of data get huge enough, the folksonomies get very useful. This is similar to what google have done. They did not idex every piece of information carefully, but they index a lot of data, when the data set get big enough, the result is useful.

[spick]

But is 'me' me or is 'me' you?