Metatagging to make your head spin
By Adam Gaffin, NetworkWorld.com, 02/04/05
Have you heard of folksonomies yet? Basically, a folksonomy is a system in which end users decide how to keyword-tag a document (or in Flickr's case, a photo). Yeah, sure, you grouchy old curmudgeons will yell "meta keywords" and than start frothing about AltaVista and keyword spammers before the nurse comes to give you your shot and you calm down again. Face it, you're just not one of the cool kids anymore.
In any case, folksonomies have a problem. In Tagwebs, Flickr, and the Human Brain Jakob Lodwick asks: What if he posts a photo of some cute girl with glasses and tags it with her name and "cute" and "glasses?" Somebody searching Flickr for photos of "females" or even just "people in general" wouldn't find the photo because he hadn't explicitly tagged it that way.
Now, a simple person might just suggest he try to tag his photo with as many keywords as he might think somebody might use to search for it. But these are not simple times and so Lodwick - who admits to an "unexplainable compulsion to tag photos" - proposes a "tagweb" in which meta-tags are themselves tagged (meta-meta-tagging?) with their meaning. So he would tag the girl's name with "female." Of course, that word then also needs to be further defined, so you set up another tag hierarchy, in which the "female" tag is itself tagged with, say "person." And so on and on and on.
Eventually, all the tags for all the photos meet in some grand circle of life or something and nirvana is achieved. In case you can't grasp the concepts, Lodwick has also prepared a Quicktime video showing how all this would work. Me? I think I'll go down to our favorite Chinese takeout place, where they have mirrors on opposing walls, and just stare at the infinite recursions of myself until I feel better - or get dizzy enough that I have to sit down and stare at the floor.
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