Tagging: Emerging Trends

WebVisionsMay 23, 2008Portland, OR

A bit about me...User Experience ConsultantEdmonton, CanadaSpeakerBloggerAuthor

Question: When was metadata invented?

Source: New York Times

Vertical Filing Colour TV

vs.

Volu

me

Time

Volu

me

Time

?

User Resource

Tags

What’s Next?

Trends

• More Structure

• Automanual Folksonomies

• Leveraging Communities

• Sparking Innovation

More Structure

Structure

Sticky

Not Sticky

User Resource

Tags

Resource

CD

Metadata from songs can be aggregated to describe albums and artists.

CD CD

Artist Artist

http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2005/09/how_to_build_on_bubbleup_folksonomies/

Leveraging Communities

“humor” vs “humour”

British SpellingDouglas AdamsTerry Pratchett

P.G. WodehouseBill Bryson

American SpellingJon Stewart

David SedarisThe Onion

Douglas Adams

Automanual Folksonomies

Tim Spalding

Combine TagsReduce noise & collapse

obvious synonyms

Tag MashArbitrary tag combinations

& weighting

TagsonomiesUse tag combinations to

replicate categoriesEvergreenCategories

“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

geo:lat=54.1423

geo:long=-113.1232

Marker Tag

Machine Tags}namespace key value: =

clothing:size=”large”blog:via=”http://atomiq.org”upcoming:event=266399

Flickr

Dan Catt

Innovation

Flickr Users

Developers

Job at Flickr

Useful Tools

New API Methods

Trends

• More Structure

• Automanual Folksonomies

• Leveraging Communities

• Sparking Innovation

Jon Udell

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

http://genesmith.ca

Gene Smith

Principal, nForm User Experience

Email: gene.smith@nform.ca

Blog: http://atomiq.org

Twitter: http://twitter.com/gsmith

Slides: http://slideshare.net/gsmith