Flickr, Tagging, and the F-Word

Jessamyn West
www.librarian.net/talks/flickr

24oct05

Simple Social Software

• easy upload - from your phone, iphoto/picasa, winxp, email
• easy find - search, tags, browse, popular, favorites
• easy share - simple licensing, contacts/family/friends, comments & notes

But what's the big deal?

Metadata...

• ...by me!
• ...by my family and friends!
• ...by anyone?

links: my popular tags, popular tags
libraries tag: mine, all, clusters
orange tag: mine, all, clusters

Please read more:
Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia by Cory Doctorow [old, still good]

    vs.    
It's not a fight. The systems can co-exist. But we need to recognize the differences between paper and digital data.

FOLKSONOMY

• user created metadata
• "grassroots community classification of digital assets"
• flat namespace
• not mutally exclusive with other systems

• helps with scalability problems with professionally created metadata [time & effort]
• helps involve users in the process & tames the sharing urge

Please read more
Metadata for the Masses by Peter Merholz
Grassroots Cooperative Categorization Of Digital Content Assets: Folksonomies, What They Are, Why They Work by Robin Good

Jessamyn West is the editor of the weblog librarian.net and the co-editor of Revolting Librarians Redux. She works as a community technology mentor with people and libraries in Central Vermont.

Her latest writing about technology appears Searcher Magazine. Her latest writing about midget wrestling appears in Wikipedia. IM her at iamthebestartist. Look at her Flickr pictures here. Thanks to Mom for the background photo.

This presentation was created in HTML using CSS. There was no PowerPoint involved in this presentation except as a nagging bad example. The layout and stylesheet are available to borrow via a share and share alike creative commons license. See source code for details.

slides version | printable version