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The Future of Folksonomy |
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As
folksonomies are very new, it is difficult to
predict what
directions people will take them in. From the graphs and
analyses
available, it appears that use of folksonomies is still on the upswing,
and discussion in the "blogosphere" continues. There
are many predictions, from utopic ideals of tags
incorporated into everything from search engines to home computers, to
dystopian warnings of clutter, unusability, and advertising.
The DystopiansSome believe that folksonomies will become unmanageable,45 that the cost of classification is being transferred from the information creator to the information user.46 Michael Wexler doesn't reject the assertion that people use folksonomies because they are easy and graspable, but he counters that they will not stay that way:"Ease
of use
is not the same as utility: folksonomies will stay only as long as good
terms are chosen that others can “grasp”. Once we
recognize that we are
all using 20 different terms for the same thing, and that’s
making info
hard to access… then we recognize (sigh, yet again) why an
organized
typology makes sense."47
In a similar vein, Danny Sullivan concludes that folksonomies can be useful, but we shouldn't expect much from them,48 especially once they've taken off and we've used hundreds of terms. Others argue that folksonomies are irrelevant when we have such strong search algorithms, and can search within pages for content.49 Several people have discussed the fears of spam-tagging, or spagging, contributing to erroneous classifications and "dilution of meaning," 50 51 while marketers are already licking their chops at the consumer information and advertising opportunities that folksonomies offer.52 The UtopiansOthers suggest that a form of controlled vocabularies will arise out of user groups and feedback loops,53 an example of which can been seen on Del.icio.us where a group of programmers interested in non-profit technology have all started using the tag nptech.54 Standard or popular terms for tags are also encouraged by the number of views that they are likely to attract if, for instance, they show up in Flickr's popular tags cloud. Clay Shirky suggests group classification as the "next frontier." Under this scheme, people would be able to select whose tags they want to view.55The predominant vein of positive predictions does not suggest that folksonomies will trump all else, but that folksonomies will be incorporated into and contribute towards other programs and organizational systems,56 from search engines to the file folders on hard drives,57 or becoming such a common feature that we won't even particularly notice them.58 I anticipate mainstream news providers such as the BBC adapting tags to help direct readers to related content. This would be a movement away from user-created content, and back towards content provider created meta-tagging, except the meta-tags would be visible, rather than hidden in source code. There is still a desire for hierarchical classifications, as evidenced in the website Facetious which takes flat tags from Del.icio.us and imposes categories on them. Hierarchies, search engines, and file folders are not likely to go away, but there is room to supplement and personalize their features with folksonomies and tags. |
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