Summary:It is no trivial matter to be able to send a question into "web space" and have an answer come back.However, It's one thing to send out "New York Yankees" or "weblogging"; the search task is pretty simple. It's another search entirely that brings back sites, commentary, photos etc. that are "precisely" at the edge of your knowledge space. No single word, probably no single phrase, will bring back such a result.

The likelihood of search success diminishes as the searcher's knowledge space increases in size and complexity. Or, putting it in another way, my bet is that, holding "results=successful--the search result desired was found" constant, the more complex and layered the knowledge space, the more difficult the construction of and deployment of search tools/robots/spiders and etc.

Tags connect us. But they are imprecise. However, imprecise though they may be, when I am faced with the options that are now available, I'll take tags, over one word or multiword search phrases, as the fundamental search term. Tags, when used as categorical signs, will afford me a stronger chance of connecting with someone who is working on material that overlaps my knowledge space (pks or personal knowledge space), enough, I think, to inform/inspire any learning reach beyond its present boundaries .

When thinking about this it will probably be useful to think of a specific knowledge concern. For example, let's say that I am interested in knowledge-making, knowledge-making in the situation: "ecological protection in isolated, communities faced with strong real estate development forces (e.g., wealthy retirees from the big city who are more interested in a shoreline view of whale migrations than in the ecosystem damage done by acquiring a private access to such a view)".

How would I explore ? How would I choose between possibilities? 1) reading the entries of my favorite bloggers hoping for an appropriate stimulus or 2)perhaps googling a word or, in really sophisticated fashion, a set of words combined with a set of blogger names. I am faced with the sure knowledge that this must be a multilayered complex search process. Reading favorite bloggers and writing reactive entries seems to be comparable to the "One Hundred Monkeys Typing" method of creating Shakespeare's plays (i.e., pretty incredibly unlikely). If I use tags, however imprecise, I am forcing myself to abstract my own categorical view of path and implications of my own body of ideas. If there is/are people out there in somewhat the same space... and categorically representing where they are in the same fashion, if that is so, I will find them and their material. And, my knowledge space will have food for growth and elaboration.

Here's what Dave Wineberger had to say(I love the ambivalence here; exactly my kind of see-sawing! I have taken some liberties with layout and occasional emboldening):

Companies like Boeing spend years developing controlled vocabularies to drive ambiguity out of their technical documentation. For example, tech writers might be told to use the word "turn" but not "twist" when describing any circular motion involving a tool. And, at Corbis, the home of millions of digital images, the in-house cataloguers might be told to use the word "shore" and not "beach" when describing coastal photos.

But no one is in a position to write a controlled vocabulary for the Internet, And if they were, you can be sure that many of us would be twisting the night away on the beach, just to break the rules.

This is the promise and the risk of folksonomies. Folksonomies arise when people are tagging objects (Web pages, photos, etc.) in public. If you want something to be found by others, you'll choose the most popular tag. That adds yet more momentum to that tag. And before you know it, most people tag posts about PC Forum as "pcforum05," not "pcf", "pcf05" or "Esther's thang." Folksonomies are bottom-up controlled vocabularies.

For not very good reasons, the word "controlled" raises a red flag for me. Here's my mental back-and-forth on the issue:

Back: A folksonomy is not centrally controlled, which is good because a vocabulary dictator would not only frequently get it wrong, but would silently enforce her interpretation. Word choice is too important to be left to the tyrants. In fact, the first thing tyrants do is try to control our word choices.

Forth: But a folksonomy is nonetheless controlled by a majority. Do folksonomies replace the central vocabulary dictator with an emergent dictator? The word choices are likely to be more in tune with majority thinking, but the conformism of the hippies was as bad as the conformism of the suits.

Back: This is simply how language works. Words and meanings arise from a type of "conformism," but so what? Meaning itself is a type of conformism, you aging hippie douchebag!

Forth: But, language changes through implicit evocations of meaning. There is no word dictator who declares "Thou shalt now replace the word 'idea' with 'meme.'" Nope, we hear the word, get a sense from context or from a bumbling, hand-waving definition from someone at a party, and we appropriate it. After a while, a dictionary notices and attempts to freeze and formalize the definition. Yet, tags are explicit. They take something as rich in meaning as a family photo and reduce it to a single word. That's a diminishment.

Back: Big freaking deal. Categorization diminishes. Everyone knows that. It's why we categorize: It reduces complexity to something manageable at least for the moment. But often categorization diminishes so that things in their richness can be found: Menus in restaurants categorize food so you can taste it in all its glory. And if people feel that the popular tags are not categorizing objects the way they want, they can build local folksonomies, using the tags accepted by their social group.

Forth: Not in the commercial world. Steve Papa at Endeca at the PCForum open discussion a few days ago pointed to eBay as an example: There are economic reasons to describe your items for sale using the most popular language. E.g., call it a "notebook," not a "laptop." Likewise, where there are economic or other reasons for people to use the popular tags, some folksonomies will dominate. This will undoubtedly drive some ambiguity out of our everyday language. For example, someone pointed out to me recently that CNN started out calling the tsunami a "tidal wave," but switched when everyone else was calling it a "tsunami." That sort of thing will happen faster and more regularly as folksonomies grow in more and more fields.

Back: Big deal. Tsunami = tidal wave. And because CNN switched, now we can find its stories when we search for "tsunami."

Forth: No two words are every exactly the same. And clarity leads to division. Imagine that a site like NYTimes.com allows us to tag their posts in a del.icio.us sort of way. (We can do that already at del.icio.us, of course, but doing it on the Times site would be different.) There will be tag wars over whether to tag articles as "tax relief" or "wealthy welfare." Communities will form around semantics, making George Lakoff happy, but further driving us apart.

Back: So the only thing that lets us live together is the ambiguity of our language? If we ever really understood each other, we'd kill each other?

Forth: Well, ambiguity sure helps. What would we do without those gray zones?

Me: Folksonomies will influence how we use words outside of the tagging environment. It will sometimes replace the subtle, organic ways in which language evolves with the crudity endemic to explicitness. Groups will form around words, and words will form around groups, as always. We and our language will survive.

[ViaJoho the Blog: Controlled and suggested vocabularies: Are tags making us dumb?]

Adam Bosworth has similar concerns.. expressed in his own way reflects on social software at in his weblog.:

…As long as we don’t let the ontologists take over and tell us why tags are all wrong, need to be classified into domains, and need to be systematized, this is going to work well albeit, sloppily. What it does is open up ways to find things related to anything interesting you’ve found and navigate not a web of links but a link of tags. At the same time Wikipedia has shown that a model in which content is contributed not just by a few employees, but by self-forming self-managing communities on the web can be amazingly detailed, complete, and robust. so now people are looking at ways in which the same emergent self-forming self-administering models of tagging and Wiki’s and moderation can be used for events (EVDB) and for music and for video and for medical information. It’s all very exciting. It is a true renaissance. I haven’t seen this much true innovation for quite a while. What I particularly like about all this is how human these innovations are. They are sloppy. To me Tags are sloppy practical de-facto ontologies. Wiki’s are sloppy about changes and version editing. It is accepted that we’re trying new things and that sometimes messes will occur. In short, it is unabashedly creative and imprecise. I’ve always believed in the twin values of rationalism and humanism, but humanism has often felt as though it got short shrift in our community. In this world, it’s all about people and belonging and working with others….

Adam goes on to note that social software gets spammed (nod to Clay), “We got, unfortunately, any application talking to anyone (we call this spam).” He raises privacy concerns and the cost of interruptions to conclude:

It is going to be fascinating and exciting to watch how these tensions play out, namely the rising trend of people working together and collaborating and communicating over the web in increasingly real time ways contending with the human needs for privacy and reflection and with the unfortunate nature of some humans to vandalize rather than to construct.

As things play out, I’d suggest we will see forms of communication more asynchronous than email, the social network employed as a filter, richer forms of presence, easier group forming and reputation used only at large scales.

Many-to-Many 3/25/05 9:55 AM

[Technorati tags: taxonomy folksonomy tags knowledge-making "personal knowledge space"]