Matt Locke - Head Of Innovation, BBC New, talked on folksonomies.
Why is tagging content so important? Is it just a geek fetish or will it go mainstream? Are there historical parallels we can learn from? And how can we integrate folksonomies with existing taxonomies and structured data to help us find what we want, when we want it?
He recommends we read "Sorting things out".
"Comparibility" - the ability to transfer terms form content to context and retain meaning.
"Control" - there is always some kiind of control at stake. A lot of control creates a lot of comparitability, but can make things invisible.
"Visibility" - Where the politics lie. What every classification sets out to do. Folksonomies have excelled at producing this.
Locke says Folksonomies are only useful when there is nothing at stake. eBay would not use folksonomies for instance.
Generally the area of social media DOES lend itself to folksonomies.
The interface between where nothing is at stake and where there are scarcities, like traditional news media.
What motivates people to tag? Right now there is not enough motivation outside of places like Flickr.
People have been tagging since the invention of photos and pictures.
The motivations to tag - see: http://www.rawsugar.com/www2006/29.pdf
Motivatsions to tag: Future retrieval, contributionand sharing, attracting attention, play and competition, self presentation, opinion expression.
There are lots of areas to explore in tagging, such as places and names, which are often core.
The BBC is interested in working out what are the selfish indivudal motives, and how to exploit them in a network effect.
The most successful folksonomy services will be content agnostic which is a huge issue for big media companies. Locke says all social media services are content agnostic. "Which means we are the media firm to be disintermediated."
Type in BBC into YouTube.com and only the third result is BBC content.
BBC Innovation Labs was a project recently to pick apart and notionally rebuilt BBC.co.uk. Of 170 ideas, a third were folksonomy, the other third were geotagging.
So they focuised on users and they will triall them on the site.
The Creative Archive is part of an attempt to "throw things over the fence".
He also issued a challenged to the assembled crowd that means the BBC will commission ideas - not plain old tagging - but new ideas which allow interesting answers to the issues of folksonomies.
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