Visual folksonomy explanation

After reading Thomas's folksonomy explanations this morning, I came up with this diagram to show the differences between tagging approaches:

folksonomy public/private/mine/others quadrant diagram

On the vertical axis, we have tags and whether they are public or private. On the horizontal axis, we have the stuff you would tag in these systems (either yours, other people's, or a mixture). Flickr sits in the middle since it allows you to tag your contacts' photos as well as your own, and to keep some photos (and presumably tags) private. Del.icio.us, of course, lets you tag your own stuff if you want to. I put Furl in the lower right quadrant because it seems to be the only system that lets you keep private tags of others' stuff (properly, it should be closer to Flickr).

 

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Posted by Gene Smith on Jan 24, 2005. Before this there was End of the Century. Next up is Einstein's Dreams.

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Gene Smith is a principal with nForm, one of Canada's leading user experience consulting firms. He writes about information architecture, interaction design, community, the web and other such topics. More >

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