Full Circle Associates

"Information Architecture Summit in Montreal,". Lots of gems from Seb. Here are a few:

Peter Merholz on Genres:

Orlikowski and Yates: genre is "a distinctive type of communicative action, characterized by a socially recognized communicative purpose and common aspects of form". Genres emerge as a response to purpose. At one point there weren't guidebooks. Then tourism got big, and the tourist guide genre eventually emerged.

Genre is a tricky word. When we hear it we usually think of music or movies. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is drama sci-fi romance comedy. This sets expectations. A horror story has disquieting music and creaking doors. If you feel like laughing you'll go see a comedy.

Here's a sample list of document genres. "analyst report", "executive biography", "site map", "event calendar"... these all have a suggestion of what's to come and why you would use it.

Panel Definition of Tagging ( Peter Merholz, Peter Morville, Thomas Vander Wal, Gene Smith):

What is it?

- User-added metadata (e.g. for recall)
- Shared resource (photo, url)
- Social feedback loop

Wikipedia definition: "a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using simple tags"

Where is folksonomy found?
- Social Bookmarking (del.icio.us, furl, CiteULike, wists)
- Weblogs (Technorati, Livejournal interests)
- Media Sharing (flickr, vimeo)
- Other (Gmail, 43things)

Explains how del.icio.us and flickr work. Tags the IA summit site in del.icio.us, to show us. You can see other things tagged with "ia", and related tags: design, usability, folksonomy,...

Flickr was also out of the gate quickly with tagging. Here's a picture I tagged. You can see a list of all of your tags. The larger ones are the ones you use most often.

Two kinds of folksonomies. Broad: many users tag one resource; Narrow: few users (mostly the creator) tag one resource.

Two dimensions: is it my stuff or others' stuff; is it private tags or public tags. Folksonomy is where the tags are public. [SP: the chart suggests that furl tags are private, is it so?]

This is a new concept that bubbled up last year. It created a discussion in the IA community and among pundits of the Web world.

David Weinberger: "The old way creates a tree, the new way rakes leaves together".

Lou Rosenfeld: "Folksonomies ... don't support searching and other types of browsing nearly as well as tags from controlled vocabularies"

Clay Shirky: "Building, maintaining, and enforcing a controlled volcabulary is horrendously expensive."

Liz Lawley: "It's just as problematic to ignore the compelling social, cultural, and academic arguments against lowest-common-denominator classification."

Clay: "The mass amateurization of cataloging is a forced move."

Go read the rest of Seb's notes. They're great.