Humour

The folksonomy of tags

T A Balasubramanian on organizing an endless deluge of images flowing from the world’s digital cameras, phones, and websites

We return to the quaint diary jottings of Doodh Byramji, better known to friends as Doodh, the intrepid IT research engineer at Baffle Technologies—or Baff-Tech. Byramji continues on his mission to explore the impact of the latest technologies on the lives of those he considers to be the leaders of the pack.

He plans to get these findings back to his CEO, Baidyanath Baffle, the founder and owner of Baff-Tech.

Dear Diary (notes Byramji, using his own style):

I am returning for a chat with Groucho Goose, Manager, Slinky Marketing Strategy for Confusing Clients, from Duckbill & Goose. We are presently seated in a corner of the Grand Goose Library, surrounded by a vast collection of fat books of all sizes and shapes arranged in imposing ceiling-high columns and rows.

“This is an awesome accumulation of books. I am sure you must be having a neat way to find any particular title—perhaps an indexing system?” I ask, glancing nervously at a wall of tomes behind me.

“Well, yes and no.”

“Yes and no?”

“Well, Doodh, Grand Goose, my grandfather, and my father, Grandiose Goose, had piled up this collection over 75 years,” says Groucho, as he nods at the ceiling. “But we do not rely on paper too much these days to record all these references that we used to gather from around the world. In the past we used to maintain a vast indexed catalogues of these books—or metadata, as I call it—made up originally by glassy-eyed philosophers and honed by ruthless professional librarians using complex and lengthy rules.”

“So you do not use these rules now?”

“We used to rely on those philosophers and librarians to put the world in order. But we hardly use these books any more, except perhaps for the odd photo-shoot to add visual appeal to a Web page. Now what we have are information architects. But they’re not doing the hard work.

“We are.”

“We are? I don’t understand,” I say, in bewilderment.

“Ah, Doodh, what those old guys used to do was to make up a formal system of tags—or taxonomy—that made it easier to arrange vast libraries—such as this—so that one could pull out a specific piece of information with relatively little effort. For example, the human being known as Groucho Goose would be part of a taxonomy that would start with the kingdom Animalia, and branch off into phylum Chordata, subphylum Vertebrata, class Mammalia,

subclass Eutheria, order Primata, suborder Haplorhini, family Hominidae, genus Homo, species sapiens. That would be accurate, but if you want to make full use of it when you are in a tearing hurry, you have to be an expert in comparative anatomy, as well as Latin.”

“So it is too cumbersome for common folk to use?”

“Cumbersome and stifling. In most systems, no publication is tagged with more than ten terms, and one category has to be declared primary. But in the real world there is no limit to the amount of information about authors and their books. On the other hand, the Internet, with its billions of web-pages and hundreds of billions of links—which are pointers within websites to other websites—makes this information discoverable.”

“And anyone with a browser can do that.”

“Exactly. So what we have instead is a ‘folksonomy,’—tags that ordinary people using the Web—like you and me and our mothers and children—can make up spontaneously as they surf and encounter information. These would be simple descriptive words. Then, with a simple mouse-click or two, we could save these labels out on Delicious or Technorati—or any number of other such ‘tag-collection’ websites–for anyone to use. Now these are not very precise or scientific tags, but they make content that is difficult to find, much easier to find.”

“And how does it work?”

“Imagine that you put up an angry note on your blog about Duckbill & Goose and mention my name. Now if a reader—say my mother—finds that note and tags it under Groucho Goose in Delicious, or if I have a Technorati tag for it, it will show up in Technorati and Delicious under the tag Groucho Goose. Or whatever the tag my mother would have invented. Instantly that content is much more discoverable because people who are interested in me—really interested in whatever I am up to—are going to use Delicious or Technorati to find information like that.”

“The work gets done by your mother. I see.”

“Or anyone else. Type in “Groucho Goose” on Google, and bingo, the search engine smartly tracks Web pages that link to my name—modestly well-known that I am—so in no time at all you can learn not just about me but about people who care enough to applaud or smack me online. So who did the hard work? Certainly it was not tenacious taxonomists sifting through the Web and updating my every move. It was a gang of interested people—ordinary folks like my mother. Folksonomies are bottom-up taxonomies that groups create on their own, as opposed to being created by an expert. It is also known variously as mob indexing, social book marking, lazy tagging, tagonomy, free clipping, collective indexing or user-generated tagging. They are, in effect, natural classification systems for data.”

“Ah, Groucho, but why are people doing this? I mean, they take the trouble to tag something they like in exchange for nothing?”

“They like the power of naming things, I imagine. It’s like playing God in a way. But maybe they just like to help other people. For example, take the Pixo photo-sharing website—it draws on the seduction of folksonomy to organize an endless deluge of images flowing from the world’s digital cameras, phones, and websites. Now, while you may find it boring to name or describe the hundreds of private photographs you shoot each year, that labor is apparently a lot less tiresome to millions of people who like to surf your photographs online—the pictoratti.”

“They like tagging my pictures too?”

“Indeed. They happily split up your visual world into folksy categories that genuinely interest them. In Pixo, the world is made of Asia, Beaches, Cats, Dogs, Elephants, Friends, Graffiti, Honeymoons, and on and on. Nobody invented this scheme, and best of all, it’s an ongoing, democratic process. It’s a product of group interaction, like footpaths trampled across a virgin wilderness by a herd of buffaloes.”

“Would that mean having to share the road with the herd?”

“Ah, that’s the downside, Doodh. A folksonomy is quite useless for searching out specific, accurate information, if that’s what you want. When you subscribe to a tag you see what everybody else on Delicious or Technorati is marking. On Pixo, for example, you can gaze at an eyeball-stickiness engine. It is a gigantic photo slide show that tells you what the pictoratti considers to be ‘heavenly’ or ‘stormy’ or ‘blue’ or whatever else—and it is up to you to take it or leave it.”