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I recently offered advice on exploiting (parts of) Web 2.0's social aspects. The parts I didn't cover include crowd-sourcing and folksonomies, which I will cover today. (My qualifications in this area consist almost but not entirely of being a bemused observer of the 2.0 scene for the last couple of years.) Like the last piece, this is going to be packed. Hold tight.
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Crowd-sourcing is the recruiting of large groups of strangers to perform work or create content, often for free. Wikipedia is crowd-sourced, as is YouTube. It's incredibly powerful and potentially lucrative—YouTube is now accepting advertisements, for example. Another story: The Threadless company crowd-sources T-shirt designs, crowd-sources the rating of those designs, then manufacturers the winning designs. (It compensates the designers.) Threadless's founders made $20 million in their first year of crowd-sourcing. Crowd-sourcing is a very compelling proposition for businesses that want to create content—unfortunately, it can be very hard to motivate the masses to give you any content whatsoever, let alone the content you need.
Folksonomies tackle the document indexing problem, which is: No set of keywords, however carefully constructed, will be both adequately descriptive AND consistently applied. There's a conflict between the two. If you have only one keyword in your system (say, "Thing"), it'll be applied to all documents—so you get consistency ... but not much descriptive power (everything is a "thing"). On the other hand, if your system has a million keywords, you'll get great descriptive power--there's a word for everything ... but tremendous inconsistency as people disagree on which keywords go with which documents. (Even highly-trained indexers have these arguments.) Inconsistent indexing means documents will be difficult to find.
Folksonomies embrace inconsistency: They actually let users create their own keywords and add them to the system. "Let a thousand flowers bloom," that's their motto. Flickr, YouTube, and del.icio.us use folksonomies to index pictures, videos and bookmarks respectively. For reasons researchers are still trying to figure out, it works—you can often find the items you're looking for.
My guess as to why it works is that there are so many items (pictures, videos, bookmarks) available (2 billion-plus photos in Flickr, for example) that if you're looking for "cats," you'll find a bunch of them and be happy, even though you're missing items indexed "felines" and "kittens." I don't know what happens when your document counts are in the "mere" hundreds of thousands rather than billions (as they would be in a corporate intranet), and I haven't heard of any enterprises embracing folksonomies on an industrial scale, but the experiment should certainly be tried.
And that's it. Next time: Idea markets.
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A weblog is an online, semi-personal journal offering the opinion and commentary of the author on conversations and stories that appear elsewhere on the Web, along with links to relevant websites and articles. The following content is the personal opinion of Ed Gottsman, a senior researcher with Accenture Technology Labs. Ed’s blogs can also be found at ZDNet.com.The opinions of the writer do not necessarily reflect the position of Accenture on this subject.
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