Folksonomies and i18n
Peter Van Dijck's got an interesting post up on emergent i18n (internationalization) effects in folksonomies. I thought these two points were really good:
Many user populations around the world incorporate words in multiple languages in their vocabulary. The language namespaces I am talking about might not map perfectly to a specific language, but include words in other languages, and slang and such, and in this way be a much better representation of the real language of a certain user population than if we were to just use one language. So it’s not so much about language namespaces, it’s more about user population namespaces. Language is just a starting point and might be an easy way to group user populations.
As an aside, I think the real innovation with folksonomies will come from creating algorythms. It’s all about scalability. The way Google’s superior algorythm in search made them the nr1 search engine, someone will invent superior algorythms in tagging and this may make them the nr1 tagging engine.
I like the idea of user population namespaces--and I can see the value in separating them, whether it's by language or some more granular criteria. I'm working on a project for a client that incorporates freetagging into a staff directory to capture people's skills and job duties. When one of the IT staff listed ASP as a skill, a person who worked in a field office said "asp... I thought that was a snake." The organization is homogeneous in many ways, but there are still user populations that have very little intersection (though they all speak English). We're looking at different ways of disambiguating these terms within the system while still keeping it open (which I'll probably write about more one day).
For those of you with an interest in information architecture, I'm moderating a panel on folk/social/ethnoclassification at the IA Summit (with great speakers, too). As conferences go, it's one of my favourites. There's always a great mix of the practical and the intellectual, the people are fun, and it's cheap. And it's in Montreal this year.
