Taxonomy with out representation
I hate raking leaves, I always want
the neighbor kid to do it for me. The only problem is he doesn't do that great
of a job. He doesn't get under the rhododendron, and that one section by the
blackberry brambles is always "forgotten" because sifting through the
mess is not easy. But that is the price I have to pay for letting someone else
rake my leaves.
If meta tags on the web are like
leaves, what price do I pay by having the critical masses (or not-so-critical)
filter what I see? What do I give up by following the herd? When it comes to
organizing, I have always been a bit of a “pile” guy. I have piles of stuff
scattered around the rooms of my life (bedroom, office at work, kitchen table,
basement) and the thing that drives my wife crazy is I know where stuff is. I
know because each pile serves a different purpose. I can spot the pile I need
to dig through based on the category I have assigned in my head. I can
categorize my life faster and I can retrieve things with great speed (I would
argue I do it faster than my wife and her OC system.) But if something gets
moved (by whom I won’t mention, but she says over and over that where I put
stuff doesn’t make sense to her) I am lost. In essence, if someone categorizes
my data for me, it is useless. That is because what I call puce they may
call brown or purple.
What you name something matters when
organizing. The taxonomy of calling a chair a chair is easy, but is it a
lounge? Is it a settee? Is it a rocker? Tagging the web works the same for me.
How do I know what someone intended when they attached a category or descriptor
to the object? Certainly the big search sites do a great job. Well at least
most do, I am still frustrated with MSN’s results but that is a different
essay. I really appreciate the alchemy that happens when they generate results
from my query. But I want more. I want another layer that takes into account
how I sort the piles of leaves, a persistence of persona when I am on the web.
I would be comfortable (from a privacy standpoint) with a widget, or cookie, or
thing-a-ma-bob on my browser that engages an additional layer of filtering on
my search, sorting the results into piles that make unique sense to me, not
just the masses. Leveraging a taxonomy that makes the most sense to me.
Perhaps the piles of leaves in my life are reflective of my visual organizational style. I am certain that is why the light bulb in my head shone so brightly the first time I saw a tag cloud. Here was a way to visualize data (tags) that so closely resembled the piles of information scattered around my life. I rarely do a traditional linear search on the web. Instead I poke around and wander from site to site on a journey of discovery. The tag cloud was a wondrous barometer measuring the importance and interest in a site’s topics. Here was a way to not just search for the facts, but to search for the voices of a community. I could see the weight of interest reflected in this measurement of social and cultural change. It was cool.
And as I began to understand the importance of reputation systems and the responsibility members have to be accountable for the data they create, I felt a corresponding responsibility to create data that aggregated appropriately with the whole. A sort of intellectual expectation to “fit in” to the norms of each web community. I will admit I was surprised the first time a stranger tagged content that I own on the web. It was a odd mix of feeling proprietary about my media and fear that I had done something wrong. Over time I came to see that these folks were not passively encountering the media I posted, but engaging it, processing it, and using it as another leaf in their own personal pile. It was fun to think of myself as a tree dropping leaves, and not just a faceless guy raking piles around his house.
