Emergent/Collaborative Catagorization
I <3 del.icio.us. I really do. I use it all the damn time, both for keeping and sharing personal bookmarks and getting inspiration on topics known and random. But for me the site’s greatest strength and weakness is its categorization or tagging system.
It’s like this: if I want the daily link zeitgeist on politics I can hit up the politics tag, but I could just as easily rock the political tag. What’s a boy to do? del.icio.us suggests related tags, and that’s a start, but while the “political” tag suggests “politics,” “politics” does not in turn suggest “political.” Even if it did, that redundancy is dumb.
Letting people categorize as they see fit is awesome for them but sucks for everyone who doesn’t know how their mind works. If some dude with a sharp eye for quality political links but a shitty approach to filing insists on tagging said links as ilikemesomegubmint rather than “politics,” the rest of us are hosed.
But there’s a solution, and one that could work as well for del.icio.us as any other community application that requires some user-driven categorization (Flickr, let’s say). Rock with me:
- Collect a bunch of tagged/categorized data from your users, ideally in a database. In the case of del.icio.us this is already done.
- Once you’ve reached a critical mass of tagged data, patterns emerge. More people, for example, file links under “politics” than “political.” Your database will be more than happy to tell you about these patterns. Databases love encouraging people to consolidate data because databases are lazy gits who want to index as little possible, return results quickly, and get back to their
sleep()loops. - Oblige that friendly lil’ database of yours: start moving links out of “political” and into “politics” in an automated fashion. Let your users know, or don’t: they’ll figure it out. Tell them it’s “emergent” or “collaborative” or “social refactoring” or whatever. Nerds love that shit.
Neat, huh? Easy, consensus-driven categorization. But it’s not without caveats.
For starters, some users will get pissed when you start moving around content they’ve painstakingly filed with literally fours of keystrokes. This “emergent categorization” probably wouldn’t take on an established site like del.icio.us, but if you built it into a fledgling community site it would quickly become second nature.
Other concerns lie in new categories: until you reach whatever critical mass your filing algorithm requires content is going to be tagged however users see fit. In that interim people could file badly. There are worse things, is my basic response to that. Suck it up. Life is user-submitted pain.
I think this could be pretty useful, but I only dabble half-assedly in information architecture. What do you think? File responses as you see fit.