folksonomy – Climb to the Stars

FOWA: Putting Users First (Thomas Vander Wal) [en]

*Here are my live notes of this [Future of Web Apps (FOWA)](http://www.futureofwebapps.com/) session. They are probably incomplete and may contain mistakes, though I do my best to be accurate. [Suw also blogged this one](http://strange.corante.com/archives/2007/10/04/fowa07b_thomas_vander_wal.php).*

Throw out the “user”: used to be a good term to help us think of the people using our system… but somewhere along the line, the user became the annoying person for the developers, lost its empathy.

Focus on people. Real people doing real things. Me. All the stuff that has to do with my life, connecting all the bits. My information.

Real people… means we have to start thinking about their desires, wants, needs. This is really important for people who are building, designing, developing… even using these systems.

If we don’t think about their wants and needs, that’s when they start sending nasty e-mails or complaining on their blogs or facebook.

Real people includes the 95% of people who don’t live their life on the web. (Not us in the room, that is.) Think outside of the alpha/beta users. People need the information in their real life, out of the browser. Real needs there.

Tech pains:

– syncing (no comment)
– refindability: remember that time where you were trying to find something you knew was there?
– taste: better agree with the editor of Mahalo on what a “cake” is
– identity: “I gave the internet my details, why do I have to do it again?”
– easy of use
– portability
– privacy: smart privacy
– attention: we only have so much attention… we’re going the same stupid things over and over again (sorting junk out of the mail)

Lots of problems that tools today can address. What we should be doing is easing tech pain.

Tagging and other features.

Work contributing vs. derived value.

Tagging takes a bit of work but it puts your world of information in your context. Ratings require roughly as much work but don’t derive as much value.

Tagging brings up the “F” word: “Folksonomy”. Coined by Thomas in 2004: looking at Flickr and del.icio.us. It’s not a taxonomy… it’s regular people calling things the way they usually call them.

Folksonomy solves the problem of retrieval. I tagged it, so I can refind it. It’s also usually done in a social environment, so that opens it to others. Personal and shared folksonomies. **The act of tagging is done by the person who is actually consuming the information.** I put something of my identity in my tags.

Three bits: object being tagged, metadata or tag, person doing the tagging.

Identity linked to object by interest. Identity linked to metadata by vocabulary. Object to metadata by definition. A community of those using the same term to tag the same object emerges. Community linked to metadata by terminology. Community linked to object by culture.

This allows us to find more objects. Find somebody else who has tagged stuff “audi”, subtract what I’ve tagged “audi” from their stuff tagged “audi”, and that gives me five new things! Smart system.

Social bookmarking gets (more) social. Ma.gnolia has groups. Nice feature: giving thanks. Just a click to say thanks for something nice you found through somebody else.

Private groups; top tags; recent bookmarks; discussions; members.

Sharing and being social is how humans have got out of caves, and how we advance as a society.

Getting to real relationships: lots of tools have a “broadmind friend” concept of relationships (“you’re my friend, therefore I’m interested in everything you are.”)

Spheres of Sociality: personal, selective (many), collective (all people on the service), mob. *steph-note: I got a “mob” feeling when I tracked “FOWA” on Flickr.*

Directional sociality: real relationships are not equal. They can be unidirectional. Unequal access. People might have access to read our blog, read and comment, read and also read private feeds.

*steph-note: this is exactly what I mean when I say we need a way to **structure** our social networks*

We don’t want to be listening to everything from everybody. And we need to be able to do something with the information. Frustration with Facebook and also, to a lesser extent, with Twitter.

Ease of use: needs to be as simple as ripping off a phone number from an ad stuck on a lamp post. The information is portable. Our web services need to be this easy. Good example: Stikkit. Identifies that this thing I’m saving is a date/calendar thing. *steph-note: like Tumblr recognises that I’m posting a quote*

Test early, test often, and test with real people. We’re not necessarily our own best audience.

My Categories are a Mess [en]

[fr] Les catégories sur ce blog sont en grand chenit. Je me rends compte qu'à un moment donné, avant que Technorati se mette aux tags, j'ai tenté d'utiliser un certain nombre de mes catégories comme tags. (Non, ce n'est pas la même chose.) Au programme de cet été, donc, probablement, du grand ménage dans les catégories.

Have you noticed how many categories this blog of mine has? Disastrous. When I [migrated to Movable Type in 2004](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2004/01/03/switch-to-movable-type/), the main thing I was excited about was being able to use multiple categories for my posts. It got a little bit out of hand. Six months later I switched to WordPress and in the process, [wrote a plugin to help me tame my categories](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2004/07/13/batch-categories-09/ “The plugin doesn’t work with WordPress 2.0 anymore, from what I’ve heard.”). I never really finished sorting everything.

Between then and now, [Technorati got tagified](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2005/01/14/technorati-tagified/). I love tags. Tags are great. [Tags are not Categories](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2006/02/11/tags-and-categories-are-not-the-same/). Did I mention I love tags? Anyway, at some point, before Technorati tagging, I think I tried to use some of my categories as tags. So, my categories are a mess. Plus, the category hierarchy is mid-way between old categories I was trying to clean up and a new structure which is maybe not that well adapted to the current state of my blog (I think I use the same 5-10 categories all the time). So, I need less categories. But I also need to convert some of my categories into tags. See me coming?

Yep, one of the summer projects will be writing a plugin to convert my categories to tags, and (who knows?) maybe re-writing [Batch Categories](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2004/07/13/batch-categories-09/) for WordPress 2.0. But not now. No.

Tags and Categories are not the Same! [en]

[fr] Les tags et les catégories, ce n'est pas la même chose. En bref, les catégories forment une structure hiérarchique, prédéfinie, qui régit l'architecture de notre contenu et aide autrui à s'y retrouver. Les tags sont spontanés, ad hoc, de granularité variable, tournés vers le partage et la recherche d'information.

Update, Sept. 2007: when I saw Matt in San Francisco this winter, he told me he had finally “seen the light” (his words!) about tags and categories. Six months later, it’s a reality for WordPress users. Thanks for listening.

I got a bit heated up last night between [Matt’s comment that tags and categories function the same](http://steph.wordpress.com/2006/02/09/give-us-real-tags-on-wordpresscom/#comment-182) and a discussion I was having with [Kevin](http://epeus.blogspot.com/) on IM at the same time, about the fact that [Technorati parses categories as tags](http://technorati.com/help/tags.html).

I went back to read two of my old posts: [Technorati Tagified](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2005/01/14/technorati-tagified/) and [Plugin Idea: Weighted Tags by Category](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2005/01/28/plugin-idea-weighted-tags-by-category/) which I wrote about a year ago. In both, it’s very clear that as a user, I don’t percieve tags to be the same thing as categories. Tags were something like “public keywords”. Is anybody here going to say that keywords and categories are the same thing? (There is a difference between keywords and tags, but this isn’t the topic here; keywords and tags are IMHO much closer in nature than tags and categories).

Here are, in my opinion, the main differences between tags and categories, from the “tagger” point of view.

– categories exist before the item I’m categorizing, whereas tags are created in reaction to the item, often in an ad hoc manner: I need to fit the item in a category, but I adapt tags to the item;
– categories should be few, tags many;
– categories are expected to have a pretty constant granularity, whereas tags can be very general like “[switzerland](http://technorati.com/tag/switzerland)” or very particular like “[bloggyfriday](http://technorati.com/tag/bloggyfriday)”;
– categories are planned, tags are spontanous, they have a brainstorm-like nature, as [Kevin explains very well](http://epeus.blogspot.com/2005_10_01_epeus_archive.html#113011082782089285): You look at the picture and type in the few words it makes you think of, move on to the next, and you’re done.
– relations between categories are tree-like, but those between tags are network-like;
– categories are something you choose, tags are generally something you gush out;
– categories help me classify what I’m talking about, and tags help me share or spread it;
– …

There’s nothing wrong with Technorati treating categories as tags. I’d say categories are a kind of tag. They are special tags you plan in advance to delimit zones of content, and that you display them on your blog to help your readers find their way through what you say or separate areas of interest (ie, my Grandma will be interested by my [Life and Ramblings](http://steph.wordpress.com/tag/life) category and subscribe to that if she has an RSS reader, but she knows she doesn’t care about anything in the [Geek](http://steph.wordpress.com/tag/geek/) category. (By the way, CTTS is not a good example of this, the categories are a real mess.)

So, let’s say categories are tags. I can agree with that. But tags are not categories! Tags help people going through a “search” process. Click on a tag to see related posts/photos. See things outside the world of this particular weblog which have the same label attached. Provide a handy label to [collect writings, photos, and stuff from a wide variety of people](http://technorati.com/tag/lift06 “The LIFT06 tag.”) without requiring them to change the architecture of their blog content (their categories). If you want to, yeah, you can drop categories and use only tags. It works on [http://del.icio.us/](del.icio.us). But have you noticed how most Flickr users have [http://flickr.com/photos/bunny/sets/](sets) in addition to tagging their photos? Sets aren’t categories, but they can be close. They are a way of presenting and organizing things for human beings rather than machines, search engines, database queries.

To get back to [my complaint that WordPress.com does not provide real tags](http://steph.wordpress.com/2006/02/09/give-us-real-tags-on-wordpresscom/), it’s mainly a question of user interface. I don’t care if from a software point of view, tags and categories are the same thing for WordPress. As a user, I need a field in which I can let my fingers gush out keyword-tags once I’ve finished writing my post. I also need someplace to define and structure category-tags. I need to be able to define how to display these two kids of tags (if you want to call them both that) on my blog, because they are ways of classifying or labeling information which I live very differently.

Am I a tag weirdo? Do you also perceive a difference between tags and categories? How would you express or define it? If categories and tags are the same, the new WP2.0 interface for categories should make [the Bunny Tags Plugin](http://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/BunnysTechnoratiTags) obsolete — does it?

Tag: folksonomy

FOWA: Putting Users First (Thomas Vander Wal) [en]

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