PUBLIC MARKS from fredbird with tags folksonomy & flat-hierarchy

In recent times, an unprecedented amount of Web content has begun to be generated through web logs, wikis and other social tools thanks to lower technology and cost barriers. A new host of content creators is emerging, often individuals with the will to participate in discussions and share their ideas with like-minded people. This is to say that this increasing amount of varied, valuable content is generated by non-trained, non-expert information professionals: they are at the same time users and producers of information.

Had some conversations about tag disambiguation with people at work and in the pub yesterday (that’s right folks - I’m lots of fun to go drinking with). Stu reminded me that in the del.icio.us tagging folksonomy world, people are able to choose meaning by social convention - i.e. they see which tags people are using for what sort of things, and then choose an appropriate one for their needs (maybe to get the biggest audience).

A persistent theme in the interest in folksonomy, and tagging in particular, is the threat of majority control. When the meaning of a link is determined by the masses, it can be inimical to anyone with a marginal point of view, and, the larger the pool the majority is pulled from, the greater the pressures towards lowest common denominator choices.

parfois, des tags en deux parties genre : groupe:indochine et pays:indochine, groupe:Frantz ferdinand et persone:Frantz ferdinand, m'apparait comme une solution facile à utiliser. [...] Se sont des services comme flickr et technorati qui ont vraiment posé le probleme en implémentant un système de tags flat et le premier qui aura la bonne réponse et expliquera aux autres comment implémenter un système sémantique changera la face du web

a tag-based search engine

Where categories are managed by specialists in order to achieve the best classification, tags are users rough approximation of classification for a practical use. Here is a small proposal to improve flat hierarchy efficiency by patching it with some bits of categorization, while keeping the tags theirselves simple and natural...

Les systèmes de tags populaires ou folksonomies se sont répandus très rapidement. On a l'impression que c'est le système de classification du moment. Pourtant, ce type d'organisation n'est pas aussi bien que l'engouement ne le fait croire...

a blog on tagging

As tag clouds come to replace expert taxonomies in common practice, carefully constructed hierarchies vanish. In their place is a flattened world where every idea, at any level, is a topic as worthy as any other.

an experimental forum (bulletin board) using a flat hierarchy (tags)