Folksonomic zeitgeist
February 28, 2005
The Observer is playing around with folksonomies, asking all of their contributors to classify their articles using free-form keywords, then exposing the emerging folksonomy via the newspaper's blog.
What's interesting here is the attempt to marry a top-down hierarchy (newspaper sections) with a bottom-up namespace (writer-generated keywords) to create a new way of interacting with the contents of the paper.
It's an intriguing start, but for this to really fly I think they need to expand the vision a bit further. Here's what I would like to see:
- The ability for readers to tag articles (what makes del.icio.us so interesting)
- The ability to map the Observer's contents to the larger Web, especially other newspapers (a la Google News)
- A catchier name. "Folksonomic zeitgeist" is too cute by half, and must come across as hopeless geekspeak to the average reader
(via kottke)
File under: Semantic Web
_____________________« David Rome | Kauai »
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