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To work, folksonomy tags need to be distributed

Distributed folksonomy tagging services like technorati should be more spam resistant because they rely on people's natural linking behavior to determine the quality of the information they are presenting. Centralized services require a dedicated group of users to perform this same function.

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Folksonomy tagging is a growing practice on the web where people apply one or more one word tags to things like bookmarks and photos to help them recall them later. Services such as flickr and del.icio.us provide centralized community web sites where users store these tagged items. As a value-added feature, both services then provide aggregations for tags so that users can see what they and everybody else has given a tag of say “Boston”. In today's Search Engine Blog, Danny Sullivan raises the flag regarding potential abuses of tagging:

Wide-open tagging, where anyone can get their pages to the top of a list just by labeling it so, is going to be a giant spam magnet.

Another Poke At Tags As Search Savior

To which Steve Rubel responds:

OK, that's fair. So my question for Danny is, why did Yahoo buy Flickr? Somehow I gotta believe they were intrigued by the site's tagging features. ... Conceptually this might look like what Technorati is already doing or even A9 Opensearch.

Danny Sullivan Throws Water on Tagging

I think Danny's got it right, centralized services like flickr and del.icio.us, where people can essentially flood the service with their tags, face a real danger of becoming spam magnets. Human intervention is required to stop spamming in either service. If the intervention is centralized by the service in some sort of editorial review, then the service will not scale. Distributed moderation as used in slashdot might scale, but distributed moderation requires a dedicated group of service users who are willing to spend time moderating. I used to moderate at slashdot several times a week but haven't now in close to a year.

It's the last sentence in Steve Rubel's quote that gives me some hope. Distributed tagging services such as technorati, where the service actively goes out and scrapes tags from web pages are much more spam resistant. They can use things like authority ranking to prioritize where a certain page comes up on the list for a given tag. In the technorati case, authority is based on how many other authorities are linking to you, something that occurs naturally in the weblogging world. Technorati might even indicate some measure of information quality based on tag age and the authority of the sources.

Bud posted this on April 14, 2005

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Listed below are links to weblogs that reference To work, folksonomy tags need to be distributed:

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» Tagging Won't Work, We're Too Dumb from ReveNews: Jim Kukral
Danny Sullivan got it right. Tagging isn't going to work. It's a pie in the sky idea with merit, that is completely lacking in elegance and simplicity of implementation. Translation: It's too darn hard to figure out how to do it. We're too dumb. Techno... [Read More]

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» Strategic Weaknesses of Folksonomies from Get Real
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Comments

When I think of distributed vs. centralized tagging, I see the inverse of your examples. Technorati is an example of a centralized tagging system, because only the author of a blog post can choose what the tags will be. With del.icio.us, anyone can add a tag.

For instance this post is untagged for Technorati (I think, I didn't see any in the source) but 3 people have added 14 tags on del.icio.us for this post right now, and I'm sure that number will increase.

Posted by: George Hotelling [TypeKey Profile Page] at April 22, 2005 04:54 PM

Interesting points, Bud. I'm saddened by the fact that the abuse on Flickr and Del.icio.us can only occur when people register for more than one account. One of the ironies with ease-of-use is ease-of-spam.

Posted by: Joshua Porter at April 28, 2005 12:26 PM

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