Size Matters: Rendering a Folksonomy, by Jeffrey Veen

Size Matters: Rendering a Folksonomy

There has been no shortage of discussion and debate about the merits of user-generated, bottom-up, tag-based metadata. And while it's certainly been interesting on a sort of academic level, though to be honest, I'm more interested in following how these simple new ideas bubble up in practice rather than in theory.

For example, most instances of tags-as-metadata (or, yeah, "folksonomy") come into their own not just as simple, flattened metadata, but as a dynamic navigation system. So how do you present all these tags as a navigation device? If you're familiar with the photo-sharing app Flickr, you've probably seen this popularity-as-font-size approach. It's cool in a sort of voyeuristic way, and is designed to foster a feeling of, "Huh, so that's what people are taking pictures of." Which, as of this writing, is an unsurprising "2004 cameraphone wedding vacation."

But what happens when this clustered visual approach is turned around and applied to a controlled, personal vocabulary of, say, blog categories? The image above shows the navigation for Near Near Future, a blog by Régine Debatty, where the number of entries in each topic relates to the size of the link. It's a simple step, but it starts to find a middle ground between the professional and the public. Or, a hint of what Lou Rosenfeld anticipates when wrote, "[I]t's exciting to consider how these two approaches might fit together and function as a whole."

Of course, Lou was referring to the process and spirit of each system blending and learning from one another. However, this simple example demonstrates how quickly and effectively cross-pollination can happen. More to come, I hope.

This entry was written by Jeffrey Veen and posted 13 January 2005 at 9:37 AM. It was filed under Information Architecture, Web Design. | View blog reactions

Comments

1. On 13 January 2005 at 10:59 AM Jeroen wrote:

This technology can also be used reversed to drive visitors to the long tail of your site...

2. On 13 January 2005 at 11:20 AM regine wrote:

thanks for the link to us, Jeffrey.
it's max who installed the system on my blog. if anyone is interested, you can write him
user [at] we-make-money-not-art [dot] com
and he'll be glad to share his wisdom!

3. On 13 January 2005 at 12:31 PM tim wrote:

you really ought to check in with what your colleagues are doing at work from time to time ;^)

4. On 13 January 2005 at 3:31 PM AmyBeth wrote:

Nick's currently working on a wordpress plug-in for this type of weighted list over at nicholasjon.com. I recently slapped it onto my site and am having fun brainstorming how to further integrate the output. Feel free to grab the plug-in and play.

http://www.nicholasjon.com/index.php?p=1519

5. On 13 January 2005 at 10:55 PM Adam Mathes wrote:

Even though I am one of the academics involved in sparking those discussion and debates, and I find this sort of thing really interesting on a theoretical level, I too am more interested in seeing people actually *do* interesting things than just talking about it.

I've been working on something similar for my years of archived content -- see http://trenchant.org/tags/ for the work in progress, although my design isn't nearly as slick or functional, and my vocabulary isn't very controlled.

I think this sort of thing will get far more interesting if it's combined with simple social networking in the form of feed aggregation, further blurring the public/private aspects of these free tagging and folksonomy experiments.

That is, if your friends start tagging their posts too, you could monitor their RSS feeds and automagically interlink your related entries if they share a tag with one of your entries. At least, that's what I'm hoping to be able to do eventually.

Centralized services like LiveJournal may have an inherent advantage for this sort of thing, but I think it can be done effectively in a decentralized way too.

6. On 16 January 2005 at 10:35 AM Francois Lamotte wrote:

43things use the same kind of navigation for their social "hub".

http://www.43things.com/home/

It would be interesting to see the benefits for others community websites like forums, dating websites or business networks.

7. On 17 January 2005 at 6:41 AM Ian wrote:

del.icio.us is experimenting with tags sized by popularity: http://del.icio.us/tag/ for a start, and and http://del.icio.us/new/username/ does a similar thing for your tags (or my tags : http://del.icio.us/new/falsepositives ),and uses green for related tags plus red for tag intersection: for example: http://del.icio.us/new/FalsePositives/CoryDoctorow

8. On 18 January 2005 at 8:20 PM Tony wrote:

I'm curious about something, perhaps someone here can answer. How do screenreaders render such listings?

9. On 22 January 2005 at 6:15 PM praetorian wrote:

Hi Jeff... did you mean generated or generaged in the first paragraph? Also, it was with great sadness that I noticed Laura Kirkwood has apparently married. :-(

10. On 24 January 2005 at 10:04 AM Stuart wrote:

After reading this entry I started experimenting with basic weighted lists in MovableType.

http://www.uoguelph.ca/~stuartr/archives/000240.html

A plugin that gives you more control over the minimum/maximum font sizes would be nice.