Readings

Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata

This article goes over the differences between professional, author and user created metadata. Each having flaws it closely examines the strengths and weaknesses of user created categorisation called folksonomies. Even though the system is highly scalable it hinges on the vocabulary and methodology of users and the tags applied to the information can often inaccurate or only relevant in the context of a specific user. On the opposite side of the spectrum professional created metadata and classification is very precise but extremely costly.

A system that combined the different metadata creation methods into one could provide better categorisation and/or classification and be scalable for the vast amounts of information on the web. Maybe something similar to wikis where 'zealots' clean out irrelevent, incorrect and ambiguous tags and combine similar ones like 'flower' and 'flowers' in reward for reputation in the community would encourage finer controlled tagging.

Creating a separation between public and personal tags for users would prevent irrelevant categorisation by eliminating tags only relevant to the user from the public space, ie: 'me'. These are some ways that tags could be filtered and more exact categorisation and classification could be brought to folksonomies.

Activity - Playing Around

Here's my attempt at creating a derivative work:

Original image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/balakov/1614997917/

Readings

Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship

The most interesting idea expressed in this article is the term 'social network service' instead of 'social networking service', (both abbreviated SNS), for defining and classing online tools like Facebook and MySpace. It presents the fact that social networks are used for maintaining existing connections, unlike social networking that create new ones.

In the public and media 'social networking' is loosely used to describe Facebook, MySpace, etc; this inspires that they are a way to meet new people, but as stated the majority of users don't interact with people they haven't met elsewhere. Further proof that these SNSs rely on existing connections is the segregation of the various providers between countries, regions, race and social class. Surely if users were more interested in making new connections the popularity of different SNSs between these groupings would be less visible. Maybe it is because users rather connect within a certain scope of themselves?

Activity One - Mucking about with Wikitext

Editing a wiki is amazingly simple. After using Wikipedia's tutorial sandbox to experiment I found linking between Wikipedia articles very simple. You don't even have to know the URL. Both the links I created pointed at existing wikis.

My experimental Wikitext:

{{Please leave this line alone (tutorial sandbox heading)}}
<!-- Hello!  Feel free to try your formatting and editing skills below this line.  As this page is for editing experiments, this page will automatically be cleaned every 12 hours. -->

== Heading 1 ==
=== Heading 2 ===
[[Typography]] is an important part of [[web design]].

The result:

Typography links to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typography and web design to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_design. I found if you enter a non-existent document as a URL on Wikipedia you are asked if you would like to create it.

Readings

The Quality of Open Source Production: Zealots and Good Samaritans in the Case of Wikipedia

I have often heard that Wikipedia is a untrustworthy source of information, but I don't think that is entirely true. As this article says there are many 'Zealots' and 'Good Samaritans' who quickly find errors and graffiti on a page. Of course you can't fully rely on Wikipedia as there is going to be mistakes here and there, but it is a good place to start and I often use the references it provides as a guide to where to look.