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March 4, 2007
Tagging
I use del.icio.us a lot. An AWFUL lot.
In some ways AWFUL is the operative word.
While I have grown to use some easily recalled tags for specific areas of interest my initial set of tags were all over the place, there are always typos and when it comes to tagging a page I sometimes have to think too much (for my liking) about what tags best describe the page I'm 'tagmarking' in del.icio.us.
Del.icio.us have provided a helpful little service that plays on the folksonomy of del.isio.us - for pages that have already been tagged they show a list of suggestions and even go as far as to pop-up tags that match the half-completed tag while I am entering it.
This is great - as far as it goes...
My only gripe with this is to do with the laziness and ignorance (intended or otherwise) of the mob. The mob in this case is the folks who collectively use their smarts and experience to slowly quilt together a folksonomy.
The thinking is that this folksonomy is meant to make it easier for folk to find wat they are looking for as when they type in search tags they will of course be returned the information they want due to the nature of folksonomy - millions of people spelling colour without a 'u' can't be wrong can they?
Well, they aren't. But you see the problem - 'one mans meat, another mans poison' and all that.
While I appreciate the power of a good folksonomy from many levels including the fact that I hate being told what I should be doing, I feel in this case that we need some sort of 'strict father' to guide us a little bit.
What I am suggesting is that the folksonomy be allowed to sprawl as it does now, but occassionally the tags should be assessed. Some tool needs to be developed that will be able to form a profile of a web page based on its content and then associate that with the tags gleaned from the folksonomy, using the frequency of a particular tag to weigh its importance (all normalised of course).
The point of all this is twofold. First, the 'weakling' tags should be retired - with predjudice. Possibly even going as far as updating the tags in a persons taglists - after all they are using the wrong tags and skewing the folksonomy - not good.
Second, someone (possibly Google) should use the profiling tool (which would probably not be fundamentally different from Googles page-ranking algorithm) to start associating searched pages with tags.
This means that when I go to Google or even del.icio.us and type in 'asp.net templates radiobuttonlists' (knowing that that is approved tag to use..somehow...) that I will get back pages that are profiled with the folksonomy tick of approval rather than just a page rank guess.
I reckon what we are looking at is using a blind profiling tool to leverage the power of the folksonomy to stand in for a hypothetial person, knowledgable about our area of interest and in possession of an encycolpeadic knowledge of available web pages on the very subject.
Slightly more precise, I would hope, than a typical Google pagerank 'guess' (a damn good one...) that would rely on the fact that a page contains the keywords typed in - which is largely accurate, but...
Plu it would mean that I wouldn't have to spend five seconds wondering what tags to use for a previously untagged page :D
Posted by dottie at March 4, 2007 5:11 PM
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