Hayman, Summary
Provides an overview of folksonomy and tagging.
Definitions of tagging: synonymous with "label(ing)" for some, others consider them separate. Wikipedia's definition suggests that "A tage is a (relevant) keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information..."
--According to this definition, to be a "tag" it must be relevant, but who decides what is relevant? Who has the authority? A group of ambitious users with a lot of time on their hands; content experts; no one?
The term is still being worked out. Even within this wiki page in some places it is referred to as social tagging and in others as social bookmarking.
The term folksonomy is often used to mean a collective vocabularly. Some distinguish between this and a collabularly. A folksonomy only really develops when tages are publicly shared (Hayman 2006, 7).
There are many approaches to tagging: in some cases it is done by "experts" and displayed as a tag cloud (journalism example). Another approach is to develop and application that will take RSS feeds, analyze them, and produce tag clouds. This is machine tagging. In some cases tags are designed to be shared in others they are meant to be personal, but may serve the public anyway.
Analyzing tags can be a valuable exercising for looking at words that appear to be more meaningful and in current linguistic usage as a result of current, relevant social events.
There are many advantages to folksonomies, which will probably be shared by many in this room, but there are also arguable disadvantages:
1. The simplicity and ease of use can result in poorly chosen and applied tags
2. Terms will be used differently by different people: someone searching for cats will not find those tagged as feline instead.
3. Tags often only have meaning to the creator.
4. There is usually not metadata associated with the tags (although it may be moving that way, del.ici.ous has it), so you do not know about the meaning or context of the tag provided
5. Social tagging (as well as other social media) is subject to spam and malicious practice
6. People's behavior may change when they tag their own things as compared to tagging someone else's things.
7. Mob mentality: "tags may come to represent a dominant view, discouraging usage of less popular concepts (and terminology) which become disproportionately overwhelmed by the majority. Users will tend to use popular tags and may not realise that there is a more precise term available for their concept..."
Is it possible to combine the two approaches and gain benefits from both? This paper, Steve, and another research project called FaceTag each ask that same question.