Taxonomies are critical to good information systems. But can non-librarians develop effective taxonomies? Several Web sites now being built use socially developed taxonomies. Del.icio.us and Flickr both attract large groups of people describing their content in a way that they all can share. Del.icio.us lets participants share Web bookmarks; Flickr offers online photo sharing. Finding information on either site demands some agreed-upon, dynamic way of classifying content, and changing that classification as the content grows exponentially. Feedback is immediate; you see whether others agree (use) or disagree (don't use) your tags. Stewart Butterfield of Ludicorp, developer of Flickr, thinks this user-driven approach has advantages. "If you can hire enough excellent librarians, you will get better keyword results than with social approaches. However, as the content grows, tagging (and retagging) becomes an order of magnitude more difficult. In other words, social approaches are 80% as good as and 10 times easier than top-down approaches." Would Flickr's approach work in the buttoned-down corporate world? Butterfield says, "Anticipate resistance in the CIO crowd who don't want to risk losing control in a social self-correcting process and do not want anything to get lost."
posted by Marcus Zillman |
4:15 AM
