A system of taxonomy based on the collaborative production of ‘tags’ for the indexing and categorising of content.
Tagging of images and information by networks of users!
A tag is a piece of information, a type of description, to provide information on the location of the object. An act of ownership on a physical location at a specific time and place.
Meta data- data that describes data, audio text or images etc. For location by browsing or searching. E.g. html code.
Taxonomy- Folksonomy is a form of taxonomy that is mediated by digital communication – a more traditional pursuit – it has become really popular – tree structure – every entry has a hierarchal relationship to another piece of data (taxonomic restraint) e.g. spiders à different species of spiders – the mapping of relationships between species – parent and child relationship between types of information. – Folk taxonomy- different to folksonomy – still employ this tree-like structure for the organisation of knowledge, but everything is arbitrary e.g. astronomy- trying to order the universe around a specific culture.
Pierre Levi Strauss- Folk is like a collective intelligence.
We always order and label knowledge almost unconsciously.
Limitations- lack of controlled vocab, horseless carriage (juxtapose refers to it as this- the horse is the defining system of transport at first, then a carriage comes along that doesn’t need a horse- this is a folksonomy- they work as info structures, but aren’t the result of a top-down work, clouds not trees, user bias and sabotage, portability.
They rely on trust, and depend on the user tagging accurately and widely.
If you don’t manage your tag, you end up having a tag soup – too many.
Flikr- binds people with the same interests. - Participation- a tagging system employed by Flikr – one of the ways people find one anothers photos outside of pools and contacts- bottom up classification system that decentralises control over many connections (Murray, 2008) - Unlike Facebook, its images are completely owned by the individual. - Popular amongst photographers and amateur photographers. - Each member is part of the decentralised network.
Discourse of photography and the end of cyberspace- it is no longer something you can only access sometimes- there is a fine line between real space and cyberspace. The activities on the web are becoming integrated with our daily activities.
Digital cameras have brought about a new digital aesthetic of everyday- improvisation and autobiography.
Flikr transfers the physical object to a digital form- as a memory. It is a user dependant organisation.
Flikr protested heavily on the introduction of video on flikr- you can only upload a video if you are a payed video- but this has changed.
