E-Media Tidbits

This morning, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference looked at "folksonomies," a term used to describe how large groups of people can organize information by adding freely chosen keywords. Picture site Flickr, for instance, lets users add "tags" to their own pictures. These tags' main purpose is to help people organize their own pictures, but they also serve as a way to organize the vast ocean of public pictures. (As an example, see pictures of the O'Reilly event itself under the "etech" tag.) Most people also allow others to add tags to their own pictures, so to a degree people also start to organize pictures that they visit.

Another example of folksonomies at work is del.icio.us, which lets users tag and share URLs. Tagging is an interesting way to organize information; the fact that there is no systematic taxonomy, no set categories, can be useful. As Yoshua Schachter of del.icio.us pointed out, "The interesting group behavior is the tagging that isn't categorization, e.g., 'To read' -- not a category, though it has a big group and a lot of social and user context."

Yesterday, a team from BBC Radio also showed how it allowed listeners to "tag" songs using their phones, and they pointed out how this information helps to organize songs in different ways -- suggesting new playlists for DJs, but also helping people find other songs, albums, or shows of interest. "Summery" songs, for instance.

Tagging as a way to organize information may extend even further. Phil Fawcett of Microsoft Research showed how people could organize as well as share their own files this way. "Tagging could replace 'folders' as a way to organize your files," he said, completely changing the Windows environment. He demonstrated a tagging-based desktop, where the user can add any tags to each file, group them, and also apply some simple characteristics: take a stack of digital pictures and organize them as a slide show, or share them with friends.

"Tags" are basically queries, and help users to put documents in different "piles" at the same time. And sharing tags could help groups of people find information they have not seen and reviewed themselves.

Could this system be of use to news organizations as well? What would happen if online publications would allow people to "tag" stories in any way they would want to?

(For more on folksonomies and tagging, try these two articles by fellow blogger Amy Gahran.)