IS THERE ANYTHING THE INTERNET CAN'T DO?

When I set out to write this post, it was going to be about "social networking" but in researching the topic a little, I found a more precise word for the concept I wanted to talk about. The new word is "folksonomy."

A folskonomy is a system of naming wherein the names are determined by the collective effort of the participants during the act of participation as opposed to a taxonomy wheren the names are externally defined and applied (and also static).

Actually what I really wanted to talk about was cool websites. My attempt to describe them under a term of some sort is merely an effort to make myself seem scholarly. It might have worked if I stuck with "social networking." "Folksonomy" on the other hand does not sound like a real word. Wikipedia seems to think it is, so I'm going to run with it.

To get to the point, though (finally): tagging systems. I'm talking today about websites where you tag content and then interact with the tags and the tags of others to try to take advantage of the processing power of large groups. The idea is that each user makes a list (and the type of thing such as movie, photograph, webpage, or book is generally determined by the website) and applies a variety of tags or labels to each item on that list. The user makes up their own tags and their own classification system and can apply as many tags as they want to each item. For instance one user could list the movie "Starship Troopers" and then tag it with "Science Fiction," "Heinlein," "War" and maybe "Stupid" but another user might tag it "10," "Action," "IOwnThis," and "FuturisticShowerScene." It's up to the user to decide what they want to track (ownership, genre, quality, etc...) and how they want to track things (quality is "stupid" through "awesome" or "1" through "10").

So these tagging systems are pretty useful for individuals attempting to classify and track things around them. Where they get their true power, however, is in the social aspect. The system on which these tags are stored is capable of analyzing and comparing the tags and feeding that information back to the user. It acts on the assumption that people who think alike will probably categorize alike. There are two means of sorting and some sites use one, some use the other, and some use both. The first is to sort by content, by how much the entered content overlaps between users; the idea being that if you and I own most of the same books, then I might also want to own the ones you own that are not on my list and vice versa (this is how Netflix and Amazon run their recommendation systems). The second is to sort by tags, by how similar users are in their labeling process (this is how most of the links below work) so that if I have a tag for "CasperVanDiem" then I might want to see what other people have tagged as "CasperVanDiem." Combining these two means of sorting lends even more power.

The trick, of course, is that you need to have a large user base for this to work. If only six people use the tagging service, the sample size won't be big enough for any really useful comparisons. It's the sort of thing that really couldn't happen without the Internet and it's part of a growing trend that takes advantage of social knowledge generally referred to as Web 2.0 (check that one out, too, sometime).

So what led me to this topic? These two websites:

del.icio.us
www.librarything.com

Del.icio.us is a means of collecting and tagging web links. It sounds really simple, but can be exceptionally useful. I have a list set up that serves as both a means of making my bookmarks portable, and a means of recording reference locations for future use. I do not really use the social aspect of del.icio.us, but I'm starting to. For instance, Adobe has a del.icio.us page with tons of really useful design links.

LibraryThing is a database for organizing books. I use it to catalog my own books (although I'm barely halfway done at this point) but it is also useful for figuring out what else I want to read. If you enjoy or own tons of books (Meredith and Brantley I'm talking to you) you will find this very useful.

And there are plenty of others such as MovieTally, which is the same as LibraryThing but for movies, although I have not yet attempted to use it. One of those things I'll get around to eventually...

Check them out, you may find them useful too.