There's no doubt about it: folksonomy is hot right now.
In tomorrow's edition of Online, we've got an interview with Stewart Butterfield, the founder (or perhaps that should be foundr) of folksonomic photo-sharing site Flickr. Yahoo just bought out his firm, and he's probably a very wealthy man as a result.
Similarly, Joshua Schachter, the man behind folksonomic bookmark site del.icio.us recently revealed that he'd taken on some venture funding so that he could work on the site full time.
We ran a big story on folksonomies in February and Jack wrote about tagging in a column on ETech.
Yep: there's no mistaking it. There's a real buzz going on around tagging, as a bottom-up way of organising data that lets users impose their own taxonomy on information and (hopefully) join the dots between items. In effect, this is all part of the Semantic Web, which aims to give order to the internet by using metadata to describes a document's contents.
But here's a thing I'm interested in, which relates to folksonomies and tagging: I'm lazy. I'm really, really lazy.
I want my life to be organised, but I never seem to have the get-up-and-go to do the organising. I want to do things, but I get waylaid by other thoughts or more pressing issues. I want to tag things, but there's never enough time.
In this, I might not be like other early-adopting taggers - but I am probably like the far wider internet population. I want my data to be connected to other people's - but I want to do it without my intervention. I want it to recognise relationships without my promting.
What do I do, then? Are there ways we can understand data without having to tag it?
In fact, I know these technologies exist, even if they're not in the general market at the moment. I know there are systems which can determine what's in a document without you telling it. I know that we're close to being able to get systems to decide what's in a picture, or a video. Why are we close? Because if you believe in the wisdom of crowds to organise themselves, as folksonomists clearly do, then you also believe that there are implicit similarities between data. And all you need to harness that automatically is a way to recognise the similarities.
So, when these things hit the market, will folksonomy simply be unneccesary? Or is the wider taxonomy - the one being done automatically - going to rely on the likes of Flickr and Delicious to provide a context on which it can intelligently base its recognitions?
