What the hell is a Folksonomy? (KISS)

   

i think this is a bit long-winded, but there are some interesting observations here:
Folksonomy

quick summary:
- Flickr & Delicious are cool & fun to use  (note: Flickr is down at the moment... corrupt db)
- community tagging over time defines an namespace of common (& new) words & interests
- community tagging can sometimes be imprecise, ambiguous, and least-common-denominator-oriented, but...
- bottom-up definition of metadata (by a community) tends to be simpler / more useful than topdown (by an author /academic)

as i've mentioned before, one thing i'd like to see in Delicious (& Flickr?) in addition to basic quantitative popularity ranking ("500 people thought this was cool") is qualitative popularity ranking ("only 10 people have marked this as cool so far, but 9 of them gave it a 5-star ranking!"). this gives you not only the mass popular stuff, but also enables quick identification and filtering of stuff that's "rising fast on the charts with a bullet".

Netflix does this quite well, btw... and recently launched Netflix Friends to do some basic favorites-sharing. Wish they would also enable a way for me to expose my Netflix favorites to anyone more broadly, perhaps in an RSS feed? Gotta think they would get more marketing out of opening that stuff up than keeping it closed.

Maybe i never noticed it before, but looks like Amazon has recently launched some ranking / recommendations stuff.  HotorNot has had this for quite a while also.

I've been playing around with several testing / assessment sites & deep-matching... need to learn more about this stuff, get a better sense of who's doing it right.

Comments

[Dave McClure]

update: regarding a more qualitative popularity ranking that identifies interesting stuff before it becomes massively adopted... not quite the same as what i was suggesting, but check out Oishii's twist on Delicious. getting closer.