Alex Wright

Folksonomic zeitgeist

February 28, 2005

The Observer is playing around with folksonomies, asking all of their contributors to classify their articles using free-form keywords, then exposing the emerging folksonomy via the newspaper's blog.

What's interesting here is the attempt to marry a top-down hierarchy (newspaper sections) with a bottom-up namespace (writer-generated keywords) to create a new way of interacting with the contents of the paper.

It's an intriguing start, but for this to really fly I think they need to expand the vision a bit further. Here's what I would like to see:

• The ability for readers to tag articles (what makes del.icio.us so interesting)
• The ability to map the Observer's contents to the larger Web, especially other newspapers (a la Google News)
• A catchier name. "Folksonomic zeitgeist" is too cute by half, and must come across as hopeless geekspeak to the average reader

Still, it's a nifty experiment that seems to suggest folksonomies may be gaining traction beyond the devoted nerd-space of Del.icio.us and Flickr.

(via kottke)

File under: Semantic Web

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