Gene Smith of nForm is the tagging guru. Having recently published Tagging: People Powered Metadata for the Social Web, he is a veritable encyclopedia of all things metadata.
In his talk at IA Summit, Gene identified five emerging trends in the use of tagging online:
- More structure
- Automanual folksonomies
- Leveraging communities
- Rethinking pace layers
- Sparking innovation
Note: The battery on my laptop died midway through the presentation, but I’ll share what I captured here.
More structure
- Wesabe – personal financial management site. Upload data and tag it to discover where you spend money
- Their innovation is “sticky tags” — tags that apply to every transaction from the same place in the future, versus “non-sticky tags” that are for one-time use
- Bubble up tags to higher-level categories, creates a natural structure
- “Semantic tags” — apply your meaning to the tag, e.g. IA could mean a lot of things
- Zigtag – mined Wikipedia, got benefit of user-submitted info to define tags
Leveraging communities
- Turn to communities to improve tag collections
- Library Thing: take any two tags and combine them to have same meaning (synonyms), one of them becomes the preferred tag
- Humor and Humour not combined because they hold sociosomatic designations that are important
AUTOMANUAL FOLKSONOMIES
- “Automanual”: mixed approach to tagging folksonomies
- Etsy.com is the best example of automanual folksonomies. How do you structure a tagging system when you don’t know what people are going to sell on your site? Imposes some structure but allows it to remain open
- Library Thing: Tagmash combine tags or filter by tags. Mash allows you to “evergreen” that category
- “A small amount of semantics on top of manual structure can work wonders” — Peter Van Dijck
- Buzzillions.com leverages product taxonomy and user generated tags. They also have “faceted navigation”
Then my laptop died…
Check out the slides here:
