Folksonomy Research Needs Cleaning Up
After getting flooded with e-mail yesterday about the Folksonomies: Tidying Up? in the January DLIB 2006 and yes I agree that by using Flickr as a base for much of their analysis they made a mess of their conclusions. Please go see Explaining and Showing Broad and Narrow Folksonomies to begin to get an understanding of why Flickr is not a great example of folksonomy. Showing tag distributions when tagging is limited by the tool (Flickr only permits one of each tag and does not allow identification of the person tagging, unless the API is used) is rather pointless. The central focus of a folksonomy is for personal refindability and derived from that point we get great value.
I would love to see this research redone with a better understanding of folksonomy and run the research on broad folksonomy tools like del.icio.us, Furl, Shadows, etc.
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