Tagging: Emerging Trends
WebVisions
May 23, 2008
Portland, OR

A bit about me...
User Experience Consultant
Edmonton, Canada
Speaker
Blogger
Author

Question: When was metadata invented?

Vertical Filing Colour TV
Source: New York Times

vs.

Volume
Time

Volume
Time
?

User Resource
Tags

What’s Next?

Trends
• More Structure
• Automanual Folksonomies
• Leveraging Communities
• Sparking Innovation

More Structure

Structure

Sticky
Not Sticky

User Resource
Resource
Tags

Artist Artist
CD CD CD
Metadata from songs can be aggregated
to describe albums and artists.
http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2005/09/how_to_build_on_bubbleup_folksonomies/

Leveraging
Communities

“humor” vs “humour”
American Spelling British Spelling
Jon Stewart Douglas Adams
David Sedaris Terry Pratchett
The Onion P.G. Wodehouse
Douglas Adams Bill Bryson

Automanual
Folksonomies

Tim Spalding

Combine Tags
Reduce noise & collapse
obvious synonyms
Tag Mash
Arbitrary tag combinations
& weighting
Tagsonomies
Use tag combinations to Evergreen
replicate categories
Categories

“I notice a hesitance toward hard-coded
semantics and manual work—people think
these things won’t scale. I learned to mix it up...
a small amount semantics on top of minimal
structure can work wonders.”
Peter Van Dijck

Sparking
Innovation

Any Text
String
Write Read

geotagged Marker Tag
geo:lat=54.1423
geo:long=-113.1232 } Machine Tags
namespace : key = value
clothing:size=”large”
blog:via=”http://atomiq.org”
upcoming:event=266399

Flickr Innovation
Flickr Users Useful Tools
Dan Catt Job at Flickr
Developers New API Methods

Trends
• More Structure
• Automanual Folksonomies
• Leveraging Communities
• Sparking Innovation

“When the hype wears down... I think tagging
will have altered the information landscape in
a fundamental way”
Jon Udell

http://genesmith.ca

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