Folksonomy Provides 70 Percent More Terms Than Taxonomy

The result comes from the Steve Museum, an amazing project in which people apply tags to…art. The early results from their research suggest that the words people use differ quite a bit from what the terms a museum uses.

As Thomas suggests, lots of folks are going to use tags to supplement taxonomy…but I’m wondering if that’s not a fool’s errand. More specifically, I think a taxonomy might be too rigid a tool in many cases, where a flexible navigation system, fed by the terms exposed in a folksonomy, might be a more reasonable road. Call it a taxonomy if you want…but what I’m thinking of isn’t nearly as static as most taxonomies.

For example, if there is a new item introduced into a collection…say an iPhone…the navigation changes in response when the number of tags for that item reaches some threshold. It doesn’t need an explicit decision to happen. So, if people are talking about it, tagging it, then it’s in the nav system. If they’re not, then it gets weeded out over time.

This is one of those statistics that doesn’t really lend itself to direct implementation…we can’t say “Oh, we should change our site by doing X”…but surely has important implications for the design of social software.

In a fascinating piece on the amazing growth of the photo-sharing site Fotolog, Jason Kottke clearly articulates a growing problem in design:

“Fotolog…relative to Flickr…has changed little in the past couple of years. Fotolog has groups and message boards, but they’re not done as well as Flickr’s and there’s no tags, no APIs, no JavaScript widgets, no “embed this photo on your blog/MySpace”, and no helpful Ajax design elements, all supposedly required elements for a successful site in the Web 2.0 era. Even now, Fotolog’s feature set and design remains planted firmly in Web 1.0 territory.”

How do sites with sub-optimal visual design and technology grow so big and become so successful? How are MySpace, Fotolog, and Craigslist so popular in an age that values stunning visual design and amazing technology above all else? Conversely, how is it that Flickr, full of beauty and Ajax, is being overtaken by a site as boring as Fotolog?

Aye, there’s the rub…a rub that defines the current state of web design.

First off, a little throat-clearing. We’re dealing with Alexa stats here, so there are no guarantees that anything is accurate. Just because Alexa shows that Fotolog gets more traffic than Flickr doesn’t mean that it is…it’s kind of like listening to a reporter who usually covers political news tell us what’s going on in Silicon Valley. Suspect, to say the least. But for the sake of argument let’s assume that the trend is right, and that Fotolog is overtaking Flickr in terms of traffic.

Page views and Ajax…a match made in Hell

Well, one reason why Fotolog might appear so successful is the very technology that Jason mentions: Ajax. Page views are a metric that Alexa uses in its traffic calculation. But when you switch to an Ajax interface, your page views plummet. For example, when people want to add a tag, change a headline, or edit a photo set on Flickr very few page views occur. You’re simply interacting with a single screen that doesn’t refresh, but sends and receives requests in the background. This undoubtedly has a huge effect on the page views on Flickr.

Fotolog, on the other hand, gets a page view anytime a person wants to change anything. Therefore, less efficient bandwidth consumption and server usage actually gets Fotolog much higher traffic numbers…which is pretty damn ironic.

What’s more ironic is that this is an increasing problem on huge advertising sites and few people want to talk about it. What’s at stake? Billions of dollars that are wrapped up in page-view models where money changes hands depending on what “traffic” a site receives. And for years that traffic depends on page requests to a server, which of course happens even when people are doing simple things like changing a photos headline. So while companies realize that using an Ajax interface, when done well, can literally save millions in bandwidth costs and actually provide a faster, easier-to-use interface, they also realize that their advertisers only know one metric: the page view.

I’ve talked to some folks at Yahoo about this, and they say that their discussions on this topic get pretty tense. This is a huge problem for them because so much of their revenue is advertising based but they know that the future of interface design is elegant Ajax. This problem has been known for some time, but we’re still at the start of the huge effort in migrating away from the page view as a valuable metric for anything.

Technology doesn’t a great value make

Jason makes a strong case that technology is over-valued. I think he’s exactly right when he says:

“Maybe tags, APIs, and Ajax aren’t the silver bullets we’ve been led to believe they are. Fotolog, MySpace, Orkut, YouTube, and Digg have all proven that you can build compelling experiences and huge audiences without heavy reliance on so-called Web 2.0 technologies. Whatever Web 2.0 is, I don’t think its success hinges on Ajax, tags, or APIs.”

This is the exact problem I’ve been talking about lately: in some cases visual design and/or technology are trumped by other aspects of design.

In my Social Design talk, which I most recently gave at the Web App Summit, I ask this question: What are the most successful web sites in the world? The answers are the ones you would expect: Google, YouTube, MySpace, Yahoo, Craigslist, Amazon, eBay.

But then I ask the question slightly differently: What are the most well-designed web sites in the world? Outside of a minimalist Google, there is no overlap for most folks. None of the others on the list are “well-designed” in their minds…they’re simply successful, poorly-designed sites. They attribute the success of these sites to other factors: being first in the market, having economies of scale, etc.

From a visual design standpoint they might be right: these sites aren’t going to win any visual design contests. But the value of these sites goes so far beyond the visual that to judge them by the way they look is to completely miss the boat. In our testing at UIE, for example, we’ve never had anyone refuse to shop at Amazon because it doesn’t look great…in fact people are most passionate about Amazon because of the value they get from reviews…and the rest of the socially-focused features there. People love Amazon, and it has nothing to do with its visual design!

And people are passionate about the other very successful sites, too. To Jason’s point, the major value of all of the successful sites doesn’t rest on what specific technology they use or whether they have tagging. Instead, the major value rests on social aspects of the design…take away the interaction of the communities on these sites and there is very little value left in them. Take away the reviews from Amazon and you’ll hear a great big sucking sound of folks rushing out to buy their wares on some other site…

Similarly to Amazon, Fotolog relies heavily on social interaction, in their case sharing photos with friends. This is the primary value of the site, not how they do it from a technological standpoint.

The usual red herring: judging a book by its cover

Ignoring visuals and technology (at least temporarily) is a big change for many designers and technologists. Why? Because technology and visuals often get the credit when things go well, but aren’t really talked about when things go contrary to our assumptions. That’s exactly Jason’s point: why is it that Fotolog uses inferior technology and visual design and still succeeds?

I think the answer is that the differentiator on the Web right now isn’t great visual design or technology, although those help out tremendously (don’t get me wrong!). An analogy might be in order here because so many people think I’m trying to denigrate visual design…I’m not! Here’s an analogy:

Every time George Bush makes his State of the Union Address he speaks very clearly, his words are well-chosen and his speechwriters are obviously top-of-the-class. They communicate very well, and for the most part every single person who listens or watches the address knows exactly what George Bush is trying to say. Speechwriters learning the craft would do well to emulate the skill and technique of Bush’s speechwriters. Even so, the address is a bunch of statements that most people disagree with: most people want the U.S. out of Iraq and observe that the efforts there have largely been a failure. Even Bush’s own party is now alienated. But the State of the Union Address itself is well-executed: it’s clear communication…Bush is just sending the wrong message.

(update: several folks are angry with me that I used a political analogy…I’m certainly open to suggestions for future analogies where the communication is clear and well-executed but fails to deliver the right message to the audience)

This is the same with visual design: you can execute beautifully but if the message you’re sending isn’t the one the audience wants to hear then the overall design will be a failure. I believe this is what Jason is talking about with his repeated references to “Web 2.0″. He doesn’t see the value in the majority of so-called Web 2.0 services…they might look great and have interesting technology but if they don’t actually improve our lives…then what good are they?

Visual design is about communicating a message well…getting the point across. The problem comes when the message being communicated isn’t the right one…and that’s exactly what we’re seeing so much of…so many sites have great visual design and great technology but just aren’t sending a valuable message…

Where are all these sites? They’re everywhere: they’re the ones you’re NOT using.

There are two primary aspects of design: communicating the right message. Why is this two aspects? Because one aspect is communicating a message well and the other is making sure it is the right message in the first place. Perhaps this second part is what is called design strategy these days. I don’t know, but I know that one needs the other in each and every design project.

Preventing valueless design

We need a new way of thinking to prevent valueless design. Valueless design is like a George Bush speech: well-executed but wrong. While it may be communicating beautifully on one level, the impact on society may be minimal or, even worse, negative. We need design that provides real value to humans.

The new model as I call it is social design: a focus on the social lives of users, the context of how people live, and the connections they have with their family, friends, and loved ones. It’s about the daily activities that people care about, that make their lives richer, more fulfilling, and that have very little to do with how a piece of software looks or works behind the scenes.

But that’s just how I see it. I’m sure that other ways to get people in the right design mindset. I believe the best designers not only execute technically well, but have the mindset to discover the right design. They’re open to new ideas, passionate about what they do, and focused on the lives of their users in order to prevent sending the wrong message.

With metadata capabilities built into Mac OS X Tiger, it was only a matter of time before someone started using tags to keep track of their files. The Mac search system, Spotlight, provides ways to attach metadata to files that could help us find them much more easily than searching through our trove of hierarchical folders.

Back in April Nick Santilli wrote this piece at Lifehacker: Metadata as a ‘filing system’, explaining how he used both the built-in Spotlight features as well as the application Quicksilver to create a folksonomy for himself. Here is a snippet:

“I think it took me about 4-6 weeks before I got things ironed out to a point where it became effortless in execution and actually useful to me. Using a metadata filing system as opposed to folders requires a slight shift in the way you think. It’s not difficult, but it is something you have to work at a bit to truly acquire the habit.

For now, get thinking in a metadata frame of mind, because it’s the future of modern operating systems.”

Wow, that’s some serious optimism for the tagging approach.

Nick has now continued his investigation into the matter with this piece: Using Metadata Effectively in OS X

This use of tags is very similar to how people are tagging items online with services like Del.icio.us. There’s a lot going on in this space…and the operating systems are now starting to catch up. Word is that Vista also has a lot of metadata features, but since it only just came out the Mac is where the research is right now.

I haven’t tried this yet, but I’m anxious to see if it works.

(note, read down through the comments in the second piece: people have lots of suggestions for similar/alternative uses)

28% of online folks have tagged content (U.S)

At first glance this number seems extremely high. Over 1/4 of online Americans have tagged content? This is way more than the single digit %s (or lower) that have been reported previously (Dave Weinberger reports seeing 0.5%).

However, there may be more merit to the number than it may seem.

The study asked people “Please tell me if you ever use the internet to categorize or tag online content like a photo, news story, or a blog post.” Now, Pew asked not just about the activity of tagging, but also the activity of categorization. That’s a big difference.

Categorization is something we’re all familiar with. We categorize things all the time: it’s a familiar term and activity. We’re used to categorizing things, both offline and online. It’s not a new activity. My guess is that if someone were to ask you about categorization the answer might be much different than if they asked you about tagging.

The funny thing is, that tagging is a special form of categorization by users. It’s nothing more. But it might be entirely possible to categorize things without tagging them, especially if the categories already exist. Alternatively, it is entirely possible to tag things without categorizing them.

To categorize means to place in a category. (it can also mean to create a new category and place in that). To tag means to apply a tag.

Take the site webshots.com, for example. For every picture you upload (or more specifically, every album) you have to place it in a category. This isn’t tagging, per se, because you’re not associating one of your own words with the picture. But you are associating one of the site’s categories with the picture. So that’s an example of categorization but not tagging. There is no tag here.

In addition, the study asked people about their behavior. This should always raise a red flag, because of a user’s inability to report accurately on their own behavior. This is a clear bias that exists, and affects every study done of this sort.

So right now I would take the number with a grain of salt. However, it does suggest a strong role for self-categorization, it’s just not clear what self-categorization means. Does it mean categorizing according to someone else categories? Or categorizing in a folksonomy using one’s own tags?

My guess is that the people answering the question didn’t sweat this distinction all that much.

So, what are your thoughts? Do you think that 28% of people are tagging?

Whether I meant to or not, I was assuming that the taxonomy’s cousin, the folksonomy, scales well. And most folks who wrote in or commented seemed to agree with that.

This morning Donna Maurer at Digital Web picked up on the thread and asks if I’m not assuming too much about folksonomies. Maybe they’re scalable, but not usable.

So, let’s ask that question, too.

Are there examples of folksonomies that work well at a large scale?

Is anybody out there using a tagging system (and using it well) that doesn’t seem to mind when more and more content is added?

“Is there any living, breathing example of a taxonomic approach working (scaling) to keep-up with the hyper-efficiency we see in peer-production systems? I’m being quite serious here. Can you point me to a working model?.”

Why is this an important question?

This is an important question because of the widely-held assumption that taxonomies are the right answer for most of our information organization problems.

The thing is, I’m not happy with any taxonomy, really. I can’t think of a single one that works well for me, let alone works perfectly. Even a site with as simple a taxonomy as Apple.com confuses me, with some links on the 2nd level nav (like software and hardware) that are clearly a wider scope than those on the top level. I have to remember that this is the case when I want to find the software page…I have to remember the taxonomy, which to me is a mark of a poor one.

Even the taxonomies I build for myself don’t work all the time, though they work much better than those that others build that I have to use.

A reasonable response might be that taxonomies are the best tool we’ve got. Most of that argument rests on these facts:

1. Taxonomies have been around for a long, long time and are the core of several disciplines including library science and are thus trusted by many practitioners as the Right Way to Do Things.
2. Taxonomies are easily implemented without the input of users. This is a bad idea, of course, but that’s a big reason why there are so many of them.
3. Folksonomies are new and therefore scary. Even the best example of them, Del.icio.us, has only been around for a couple years and only been working at a huge scale for about a year.
4. Folksonomies suffer from the Cold Start Problem (CSP). You have to build up tagging datasets over time, so at the beginning there is really no navigation to build on top of them.

Now, I don’t think that it has to be either/or. We don’t have to build either a taxonomy or a folksonomy, necessarily. They might co-exist in some way, as Thomas Vander Wal has argued.

But the question still stands…are there any examples of knock-down, drag-out taxonomies that scale in today’s world and generally work well for those who use them?

UPDATE Donna Maurer at Digital Web has taken me to task for blurring the question, saying I’m asking for a scalable taxonomy while really wanting one that works. She’s absolutely right…I’m assuming that while it scales the taxonomy still has to be useful. Can’t we have both?

He quotes the article (which I had read quite some time back, but now with renewed interest)

“The motivations to tag can be categorized into two high-level practices: organizational and social. The first arises from the use of tagging as an alternative to structured filing; users motivated by this task may attempt to develop a personal standard and use common tags created by others. The latter expresses the communicative nature of tagging, wherein users attempt to express themselves, their opinions, and specific qualities of the resources through the tags they choose.”

It should be noted that some folks have much more strict rules governing their own organizational needs than others. For example, some spend hours organizing their del.icio.us tags into hierarchies, while others don’t. (I don’t). Some tag each and every one of their photos on Flickr, while others do when it suits them. (like me)

This, to me, is a very powerful benefit of tagging. You can do how much you want, when you want, according to any rules you want (or don’t want). And, because of the effects of scale in tagging, it’s still OK, and there will still be social value even if you aren’t comprehensive in your tagging.

So, why do people tag? Well, part of the reason might be that there isn’t a penalty for not tagging. Tell me I have to do something, and I won’t do it. Give me a choice, and perhaps some positive reinforcement, and I just might do it.

That’s how software should work. User first. System second.

Ok, so I got into hot water for my Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture post…

But I’m completely fascinated by this subject. In that piece I referenced a work by Elaine Petersen entitled Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy. Elaine eloquently argues that since tagging systems can contain incorrect information (non-Aristotelian, she calls it brilliantly), they will eventually fail to serve our needs. She says:

“Although folksonomy advocates are beginning to correct some linguistic and cultural variations when applying tags, inconsistencies within the folksonomic classification scheme will always persist. There are no right or wrong classification terms in a folksonomic world, and the system can break down when applied to databases of journal articles or dissertations.”

This argument, as I’ve mentioned before, is one about relativism. Is it OK to have systems which contain misinformation, even if it happens to be the way someone thinks and tags?

Let me put it more bluntly: Do people have the right to think how they want?

If we re-ask the question in this way, the answer is clear. (And no, I don’t think it’s ridiculous to equate this argument with allowing people to think what they want. At some level it *is* about that, in a weird science-fiction way)

So, of course we have the right to think what we want, at least most people think so. (insert analogous religious argument here about actions and beliefs)

Anyway, if you’ve read Bokardo for any period of time (go here to win prizes) you know that I believe our systems should model our behaviors and thoughts, not the other way around. We shouldn’t have to map what’s in our head to some other idea set every time we use software if we don’t have to.

If I want to tag the New York Yankees as “the best team money can buy”, and someone else thinks that’s just plain wrong, then tough for them. That’s how I want to tag it, that’s how I want to re-find it, and that’s how I think about the Bronx Bombers (or was it the Yankees?). In folksonomies the view of the system is *my* view…warts and all.

Moreover, other folks in Red Sox Nation might tag it similarly, thus propagating the potential falsity in the system for Yankees fans to find (except, of course, the Yankees are the best team money can buy). Note, though, that their version of the system will have their version of tags for the Yankees…we still have a problem, according to Elaine…there is information in the system that doesn’t agree with other information in the system.

Geez…sometimes I don’t even agree with myself.

Scale is the Great Equalizer

But the thing is, and this is where Elaine underestimates folksonomies, scale matters. Even if a few people tag things incorrectly, most people won’t. This doesn’t have to do with the fact that most people are Good, it’s just that if we ask enough people the same question or have them observe the same phenomenon, where their experiences overlap will tend to be the reality of the situation.

At this point, we could go many ways with this topic. One way would be to tie in James Surowiecki’s brilliant book The Wisdom of Crowds, which makes a lengthy dissertation on the subject of aggregating individual viewpoints. If, under certain conditions, we aggregate the individual decisions of many people, the result tends to be equal to or better than an expert’s view. Here’s the Wikipedia entry for the Wisdom of Crowds, which gives a quick but good overview, and is no doubt a great irony in and of itself…(the crowd writing about the Wisdom of…itself…in a relativistic system with no authoritative voice except the accumulated voice of all its members)

Another way we could go with this topic is where Dan Stewart went. Dan, commenting on Dave Weinberger’s lengthy reply to Elaine, points to another, relatively important document Bokardoans should all be familiar with by now (I’ve talked about it enough):

“Elaine makes the argument that if an item on the web is tagged with words that do not describe it, then the system breaks down. In The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page the authors state, “Also, it is interesting to note that metadata efforts have largely failed with web search engines, because any text on the page which is not directly represented to the user is abused to manipulate search engines. There are even numerous companies which specialize in manipulating search engines for profit.”

So Dan ties in the Google PageRank algorithm to the folksonomy argument. Cool! However, at this point you may be thinking that Dan is a proponent of tagging systems. Alas, no, he is not. He goes on to say:

“Metadata is data about data, and tagging a page on the internet is essentially adding metadata. For the same reason that search engines no longer rely on metadata, social bookmarking could be abused and eventually become worthless.”

I think Dan has this second bit all wrong because he fails to distinguish where the metadata comes from and who is using it. If it comes from the expert, it’s expert-supplied metadata. This is exactly the type of metadata that Brin and Page were talking about, and in particular the <meta> tags of HTML. Those are defined by the author of the page (the expert) in the head portion of the HTML document.

As the Brin/Page quote points out, meta tags weren’t shown to the user of the page. This meant that document authors weren’t writing them for their users and thus had little incentive to make them accurate. Instead, their primary use was to tell user agents (search engines) what the page is about.

Because there is no personal use, meta tags get abused. If it doesn’t make a difference to the author what the meta tags say, then they’ll manipulate them away from what best describes their page to what best gets search engines to return them high in the results. This is the inflection point: at this point they become, essentially, SPAM.

However, tags are not defined by authors. They’re supplied by users. They’re user-supplied metadata. As a result, they’re used by the very people who created them. And, it is in that person’s best interest to keep them useful. Even though they can be incorrect like SPAM, they are not like SPAM in that someone actually has incentive to keep them valuable for human use.

BTW: this all seems to follow The Del.icio.us Lesson.

Further, what is the best example of user-supplied metadata on the Web? Links, of course. Links are essentially references to other documents. Links are created by authors but differ from meta tags because people actually use the links, following them and learning from them. Whereas manipulated meta tags didn’t hurt the user experience, manipulated links seriously kills it. If you are putting up bad links on your pages, people respond negatively…and swiftly. They just won’t come back. It’s definitely in the author’s interest to keep links valuable to users.

…and what does Google use to model how we value content? Links!

And we know why we can aggregate links in this way…because we have a large enough set of them to weed out the inconsistencies even as they continue to exist. We’ve got scale, baby!

This isn’t to say that SPAM isn’t a huge problem…it is. I certainly don’t envy the SPAM harvesters at Google. But if we look at all the people making links…the vast majority are creating valuable, non-spammy ones.

So where Dan sees a divergence and a route away from tagging, I see a convergence and a route toward tagging. Not only are tags user-supplied, personal-use metadata (and that will be their primary reason for being), but they also scale really well on a social level because they’re like links…if we have enough of them the incorrect ones (created by spammers and non-spammers alike) actually get lost in the Crowd…

And what does that leave?

Wisdom, I hope.

Christina Wodtke (who wrote the book on Information Architecture) is angry about its impending death:

“I recalled a recent blogpost by Adam Greenfield and I found a clue. I think he, and Peterme, and Lou and Peter Morville… well, we’re all outgrowing our favorite pair of jeans: IA. And the waistband is cutting in badly, but it’s our favorite pair, so of course we’re crabby. We’re all going to stay crabby unless we finally take them out of our “skinny” drawer and give them to goodwill.”

Yes, indeed. IA as it has lived will soon die. Not because it wasn’t valuable, not because IA’s didn’t do great work, but because the Web is moving on.

The problem is that IA models information, not relationships. Many of the artifacts that IAs create: site maps, navigation systems, taxonomies, are information models built on the assumption that a single way to organize things can suit all users…one IA to rule them all, so to speak.

Clay Shirky, in his talk Ontologies are Overrated, equates this type of categorization with organizing the world in advance. He uses the dichotomy of browse vs. search as a wedge:

“Browse versus search is a radical increase in the trust we put in link infrastructure, and in the degree of power derived from that link structure. Browse says the people making the ontology, the people doing the categorization, have the responsibility to organize the world in advance. Given this requirement, the views of the catalogers necessarily override the user’s needs and the user’s view of the world. If you want something that hasn’t been categorized in the way you think about it, you’re out of luck.”

Many IA’s won’t stand for this, however. Their response would be something along these lines: “unchanging taxonomies aren’t what IA is about…it’s about organizing information around the user’s needs, and practices such as card sorting help to do that”.

In addition, writers in information architecture have reacted strongly against ideas such as folksonomies, which are navigation structures built out of one’s own tags. Peter Morville, in his book Ambient Findability, states:

“when it comes to findability, their (folksonomies) inability to handle equivalence, hierarchy, and other semantic relationships causes them to fail miserably at any significant scale.”

This is a valid reply, of course, except that it’s completely wrong. Equivalence is handled by similar tags and tag clusters, hierarchy is handled by nested tags, and it’s pretty clear that both Flickr and Del.icio.us (and many other sites using folksonomies) can scale.

Thomas Vander Wal, in a recent reply to Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy, an article critical of folksonomies (a term he coined), gets at the heart of the problem here:

“This assumption…that taxonomies are great and help people find things by providing the authoritative terms is wrong. Taxonomies are always less than perfect and most often far less than perfect for helping people find and refind information they need. But, we do need taxonomies to provide that foundation structure. We need solutions that can help the many people whose terms and vocabulary are left out of the taxonomy.”

This is, on some level, a platonic vs relative argument. Either you believe meaning is inherent in the natural structure of the universe, or you believe that meaning is relative, personal, and different for everyone.

The biggest cleavage along these lines, as Shirky alluded to, is Google Search (meaning is relative and can be modeled by links) vs. Yahoo Directory (meaning is inherent in the structure of information). We all know who won that battle, but did you know that the Yahoo Directory isn’t even on the Yahoo homepage anymore? Yahoo has all but demonstrated that the directory model, and not the folksonomy model, doesn’t scale.

In many ways, the success of Google’s Pagerank algorithm was the harbinger of all this. The simple idea that people’s actions model meaning better than a directory (even a flexible directory) is a critical step forward in thinking about the Web. The innovation we’re seeing with folksonomies, recommendation systems, social networking sites…all have their roots in the idea that modeling what people actually do on the Web is the best way to provide answers for them. And, perhaps more importantly, it is an admission that we simply can’t predict the future…we can’t design a perfect information architecture, and to attempt to implies that the world we’re modeling doesn’t change.

That said, I’m not claiming that information architecture is bad. In all probability an IA would assume that Search is part of IA, that flexible metadata is part of IA, and most of what I’m using as counter-examples are part of IA.

But the fact is that IA is a theory about the inherent structure of information…the architecture of information…and if we are moving away from that we should call it something else.

Relationship Architecture, perhaps?

In the end, Christina suggests that it is all about change, and that explains why she’s angry:

“Anger is almost always based on fear, and change fuels fear.”

At first glance, geotagging doesn’t seem that exciting. You’re simply adding coordinates to pictures, right? But after taking one look at some of the early activity that Flickr users are doing with it, combined with the additional magic of mapping and search that the Flickr folks have included, and you might wonder why every site isn’t clamboring to add tags and geotagging to their arsenal. (I bet many will soon be considering it)

Here’s the skinny on the feature.

Tag photos with location coordinates

This is the first step in the geotagging process. Adding location coordinates simply means adding a longitude and latitude attributes to a photo. You know, those crazy numbers like 43.877293 Latitude and -69.4911 Longitude. This is an exact spot on the globe, allowing anybody else to find it.

Thankfully, you don’t need to know actual coordinates to use geotagging. Instead, you can simply enter addresses and Flickr figures out the rest. When you use the Flickr Organizr (no e) to organize your photos, you’ll notice a new tab called “Map”. Simply find a location by entering a street address, and the map updates to show that location. (Notice that there are already 2 pictures of mine geotagged at that location)

Then, simply select the photos taken at that spot and drag them onto the map at that location.

Done. You photo is geotagged. All software should be this easy!

Here’s a shot of the actual geotags and their coordinates. It’s a shot of my wife and kid at a wharf in New Harbor, Maine. (also notice that you can set the privacy settings on a per-photo basis)

View or share them with others

The personal value of geotagging is clear. You can group photos according to location, and see them all on a map at once. To see your map of photos, simply access your photos using a URL like this (with username/map/ added at the end): http://www.flickr.com/photos/bokardo/map/

This is a totally cool way to browse your own pictures or share them with others. Now my parents, who live in Gardiner, Maine, can go see all the pictures I have geotagged with their address. Of course, I’ve only geotagged a few pictures so far…it does take time. (and not to mention, if you have lots of photos…discipline)

Holy aggregation possibilities, Batman!

The stuff that I’ve showed so far is really fun. Geotagging is just a great idea. But even more impressive than showing family and friends pictures tagged at a certain location is what people are already doing with aggregating geotagged photos over more than one user. It’s fun to see what photos one person has taken at a particular place, but way more fun to see what everyone has done!

The Flickr Map is the place to look for everyone’s geotagged photos. Here is the Flickr map trained on Newburyport, Massachusetts. There have been 30 photos geotagged in town so far. Considering a visit to Newburyport? Maybe you should check out the map first and see what folks are finding there.

One thing that has been bothering me about mapping software…why don’t the maps always open to wherever you are? (and if they don’t know where you are, they should ask for a default location)

And the show has just begun…

This is what I love about cool features like geotagging. People figure out the most useful ways to stretch and bend them. Ok, so we’ve got a bunch of geotagged photos and a cool mapping feature that allows us to see them. We can type in an address and see all the photos geotagged at that location. Cool. But what if we start cross-referencing those geotagged photos with regular tags? (Flickr already has great tag support)

Here are just some of the views possible with geotags and tag search. Remember, when you’re looking at these maps, think about how the ability to do this stuff came overnight. When Flickr updated with their global maps and new search functionality, combined with the tags already applied to pictures, they made this stuff possible. It’s a combinatory effect. As Stewart says…imagine what we’ll have after everybody gets wind of this and adds millions more geotagged photos!

• Great Lakes Lighthouses
• Pics tagged “Lost” in Hawaii
• Sunsets in California
• Red Sox pics in Boston

With geotags, Flickr pushes the envelope that much forward. I think it’s a great social feature, and one whose surface has only been scratched so far. I’m excited to see what other views people will come up with, given what we’ve seen in the first few days.

I’m focusing this talk on the idea that tagging might help designers organize huge amounts of information by letting their users do it for them. Heresy! You say. Well, in some places it might turn out that tagging beats IA hands down. In others, a traditional IA still works best.

However, if you’ve read The Del.icio.us Lesson, you know that it isn’t as simple as it seems at first glance. So I’ll be talking about the ins and outs of tagging, where it seems to work well, and where it doesn’t work.

Interestingly, both Amazon and Google seem to have tagging wrong…

While Del.icio.us rose to prominence, much was made of the ability to aggregate the tags that the service’s user population created. The resulting framework, called a folksonomy, promised to redefine web navigation. If users could tag their own bookmarks and navigate to them through a direct tag-based interface, then there was really no need for an overarching, expert-developed taxonomy. In addition, if Del.icio.us could aggregate the bookmarks over all users, they could come up with a folksonomy for everybody, based on how the total population actually valued and referred to the content.

One of the hardest problems in web design is to speak the user’s language. With folksonomies and tagging, the web site could be designed with, and evolved by, the user’s own words. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line the vast majority of excited technologists (including me) forgot the original reason why people use and enjoy Del.icio.us. I call this reason the Del.icio.us Lesson, and I first posted about it last December in Learning more about Structured Blogging. Since then, that post has become the most referenced post on Bokardo. This post is an attempt to further illustrate the Del.icio.us Lesson.

Personal Value Precedes Network Value

The one major idea behind the Del.icio.us Lesson is that personal value precedes network value. What this means is that if we are to build networks of value, then each person on the network needs to find value for themselves before they can contribute value to the network. In the case of Del.icio.us, people find value saving their personal bookmarks first and foremost. All other usage is secondary.

As people use Del.icio.us more, and in order to gain more personal value, they use tags to be able to find their bookmarks later. Tagging isn’t even the primary function of Del.icio.us. Most of the tagging done on Del.icio.us is done secondarily, and for personal use.

The social value of tags on Del.icio.us is only a happy side-effect. Even though most of the ink spilled about Del.icio.us is about the social value, it’s really not the reason why people use it.

Similar to Google aggregating links that were originally created for taking readers from one document to another, Del.icio.us can aggregate tags in order to find out how people value content. If 1,000 people save and tag the same bookmark, for example, that’s a good sign that they find value in it. But to think that people tag so that this information can be aggregated is to give people a trait of altruism they just don’t possess.

Blinded by the Aggregation Light

Unfortunately, the ability to aggregate has blinded many software developers to think that tags are a cure-all to the success of their software. Tags have almost become a requisite feature in new software. I’ve received many emails in which developers try to sell me on the merits of their brand-new software based mostly on the ability of potential users to tag things, as if users inherently enjoy tagging things as a matter of course. Real people, in contrast, tag for their own benefit. And they surely won’t tag if the incentive to do so isn’t clear.

Aggregation, in general, is probably more effective as a second-order feature of software. If we create features just to aggregate them, without providing users with tangible value first, then people simply won’t use the features. My guess is that aggregation technologies which prove most useful will be ones that are added to some activity that users have already started doing without the promise of any aggregation benefits.

Why Del.icio.us Tags aren’t like Meta Keywords

Shortly after Yahoo bought Flickr, Danny Sullivan, of Search Engine Watch, was dubiously skeptical of tags. He compared them with the meta keyword tag, observing that meta keyword tags have failed miserably on the Web and aren’t recognized by major search engines. He was certainly right: meta keyword tags aren’t useful anymore.

However, Del.icio.us tags aren’t like meta keyword tags because of the Del.icio.us Lesson. Meta keyword tags provide no personal value whatsoever. All of their value is social. They’re for aggregation engines to find and tell other people about. In other words, they’re for getting attention only. Del.icio.us tags, on the other hand, provide personal value each time someone uses them to recall a bookmark.

Danny was right to be skeptical, though. Some tagging initiatives don’t seem to provide much personal value at all. On sites like Amazon and Technorati, who have their own versions of tags, it is not clear what personal value users are getting. On Amazon, we already have multiple wish lists for items we want to remember. On Technorati, the tags seem like a pure-play for aggregation benefit without any real benefits for users. Dave Sifry’s suggestion that “Many bloggers use this (Technorati’s) tagging capability to help get their content found by people who are searching for a particular topic” sounds an awful lot like the value promised by meta keywords. Going further, the Del.icio.us Lesson might help us parse Dave’s statistics, especially this one: 47% of blog posts have tags or categories associated with them. If the Del.icio.us Lesson is predictive, it would suggest that nearly all of that 47% would be categories that users are applying for their personal value on their blog, rather than tags applied for attention only. Any way to separate out those numbers, Dave?

Working toward Valuable Services

The level of innovation and discussion in and around tagging is phenomenal. There is increasing talk about tagging in intranets, there is Rashmi Sinha’s great piece on why tags are easier than categories, and there is even a Collaborative Web Tagging Workshop at WWW2006 this month. Tagging, it seems, has hit the big time. Everybody wants to know how and why tags work, and the best working example is the site that started it all: Del.icio.us.

Philipp Keller (who will be speaking about tags at WWW2006) in a post about how to spread the word on tagging, asks “is the tagging revolution stuck?“. This is a common question these days, as the number of services trying to leverage tagging skyrockets.

I say no, tagging isn’t stuck. Just don’t try and make it the primary thing to do. Instead, make sure personal value preceeds network value. Then you’ll have plenty to aggregate.

Additional Reading:

• Rashmi Sinha A social analysis of tagging (or how tagging transforms the solitary browsing experience into a social one)
• Dan Bricklin Systems without guilt where every contribution is appreciated
• Joshua Schachter Tagging Session at Carson Summit
• Dave Winer The utter futility of geekness
• Shelley Powers Cheap Eats at the Semantic Web Cafe
• Delicious Stats

Web 2.0 – Leveraging the Network (2.74 MB pdf)

In the talk I spoke about how Web 2.0 companies distinguish themselves by leveraging the network of which they are a part. Brittanica, for example, has had a web site for quite some time and were slow to leverage the network in any particular way. Wikipedia, on the other hand, exists only because they used the available network to improve their contents communally. And Wikipedia, of course, is a much, much more popular site.

As in my last talk: Web 2.0 for the Rest of Us (which includes a podcast), I started down the road toward Web 2.0 from the standpoint of those Web companies who have excelled: Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay. They obviously know more about succeeding online than anybody else, and have become so successful so fast that we often take them for granted, even though they are barely a decade old. So, I find it particularly useful to ask: What makes them so special? What have they done that others haven’t? And I find myself coming back to the same answer over and over: they know how to leverage the network. From Google’s pagerank algorithm to the APIs of eBay and Amazon to the movie ratings on Yahoo, these companies know how to harness the collective activity and intelligence of people to make their services better.

For those who want only the quick and dirty (without the pretty pictures), here are the talking points:

1. The home page is no longer the most important page on your site.
2. The information architecture that people use to find your content is, increasingly, not yours.
3. Each feature added to an application is more to think about – for everyone.
4. Folksonomies are a way for users to map their own, familiar vocabulary to your alien one.
5. Words are the currency of the Web. Spend the most time on your words.
6. Seducible moments are those increasingly rare moments when you can talk to your users in an appropriate context.
7. Recommendation systems are a forced move.
8. Users want control.
9. Users appreciate tools that help them make their own well-informed decisions.
10. The best software models human behavior.
11. Links model how users value content, and are only the start…
12. Sometimes it is easier to design for yourself than others.
13. There is always an opportunity for a better interface to data.
14. All things being equal, faster interfaces allow for more innovation.
15. Most people are willing to trade their personal information for good service.
16. As choices grow, so does the importance of learnability.
17. Redesigns are dead.
18. Network effects are rare, and killer.
19. Network effects work in the opposite way for teams building software.
20. Personal value precedes network value
21. People rarely do things for the “good of the network”
22. Del.icio.us, though providing very cool tagging features, is mostly about a single person remembering items for later.
23. “The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous”

I would appreciate any and all feedback, as I’ll be giving this talk in the future and would like to improve upon it in any way that I can.

Vander Wal, as many of you know, coined the term “Folksonomy”. He used it to describe what was happening on two up-and-coming web sites: Flickr and Del.icio.us. Now those two sites belong to Yahoo!, millions and millions of dollars later.

It would be silly of me to suggest that folksonomies were the primary reason for the success of those sites. But it would be equally silly to say that they were non-factors. They were indeed factors. Big ones.

The reason is that folksonomies help us do something that taxonomies don’t. Back in January, when I started writing about folksonomies, I was grasping with what that was. I felt like they were really valuable, but I didn’t know exactly why. Remember these posts?

• A Self-Referential Demonstration of the Power of the Del.icio.us Folksonomy
• Controlled Vocabularies and Folksonomies: Why Change is Good.
• Folksonomy Notes: Considering the Downsides, Behavioral Trends, and Adaptation
• I’ve Heard of Folksonomies. Now How do I Apply them to My Site?

Yeah, me neither.

But now we know why folksonomies are valuable. It is because they do two things very well.

1. One is that they allow people to remember things in the way that works for them. Someone tagging pictures in Flickr or bookmarks in Del.icio.us can use tags that they’ll remember. Instead of working twice to shoehorn a resource into and out of a taxonomy, folksonomies let users do both tasks effortlessly. Reduced cognitive load. Don’t Make Me Think. (if you didn’t read Rashmi’s A Cognitive Analysis of Tagging, you should).
2. The second thing is that they easily enable a bottoms-up classification system. When folks tag multiple resources at the same time, it is easy to aggregate those tags and provide navigation and resources that expose them. This is the reason why popular resources by tags on del.icio.us (like Web 2.0) and Flickr Interestingness are consistently valuable.

It must be stressed, however, that over the last year that we’ve learned (nudged along by Vander Wal) that the first is much more important than the second. If something isn’t valuable personally, it will rarely be valuable for the community.

At any rate, folksonomies are now entrenched in the pantheon of design, in big part to Thomas Vander Wal. Congrats!

Ok, this is scary. I’m posting a podcast of me giving a talk on Web 2.0. (also posted on Brain Sparks, the supremely interesting UIE blog). My wife assures me that my voice does indeed sound like that, (much to my dismay). I was asked to speak at an NEASIST event called Buy, Hack, or Build: Optimizing your Systems for Your Users and Your Sanity. The two other speakers were Pete Bell of Endeca and Casey Bisson from Plymouth State University.

First, the podcast: Web 2.0 for the Rest of Us (60MB)
Second, the slide deck: Web 2.0 for the Rest of Us (2.2MB)

Here is a quick overview and some pretty graphics for those interested. It wasn’t exactly clear where they wanted me to come down (buy, hack or build), but I found out a little later they had recruited me for the “build”. Not knowing this, I made the argument that the history of the Web was all about hacking, and that hacking is really the only way to innovate.

Hacking = Design on the fly

In my talk, which I gave with the highly recommended Apple Keynote, I equated hacking with design on the fly. There are several outcomes of designing on the fly:

• A focus on context and current user needs instead of standards and conventions
• Brings the ire of purists (Google.com doesn’t validate…oh the horror!)
• Lends itself to multiple iterations, trial/error
• How innovation most often happens, especially on the Web

Four Aspects of Web 2.0

I also made it clear that I wasn’t going to define Web 2.0, as most of the definitions I’ve heard are ambiguous, to say the least. Instead, I focused on four aspects of Web 2.0 that I think are most relevant. Here they are:

These four aspects I broke down as follows:

• Learning from the Dot Bomb Survivors
  The Four Horsemen: Google, Amazon, Yahoo, and eBay. These companies have become cliché, and we take them for granted, even though they have consistently come up with the most innovative designs. Amazon’s reviews? Yeah, they’re cool. But why are they consistently better than anyone else’s reviews? That’s the question.
• New, Enabling Technologies
  RSS, APIs, REST, and Permalinks. These technologies haven’t been around all that long, and they’re crucial to today’s applications.
• Social Software Best Practices
  Folksonomies, Blogs, Wikis are changing the way that we interact with each other on the Web. What are the best practices in implementing these? We’ve learned a lot about folksonomies, but it seems we’ve only scratched the surface.
• Design by Modeling User Behavior
  This is what the other quadrants point to. Learn from the Dot Bomb Survivors and identify best practices in social software while observing analog user activities. Then use new, enabling technologies to model them digitally.

In other words, I think that Web 2.0 is all about learning how to design systems that model user behavior. This is similar to many other ideas that folks have put forward about Web 2.0, including Tim O’Reilly’s harnessing collective intelligence and John Hagel’s distributed, collaborative and cumulative creation.

Where my view differs from theirs is that I characterize Web 2.0 as simply modeling what we already do in our offline, analog lives. Societies have always harnessed collective intelligence, albeit on a small scale and in a very lossy way. We’ve always done distributed, collaborative, and cumulative creation, just at much smaller distances and without recording it in bytes. The new wave is simply bigger, online, recorded, and digital.

In short, I think Web 2.0 is about modeling something that already exists in our offline worlds, mostly in the spoken words and minds of humankind.

I hope you enjoy the talk.