Having written quite a bit about folksonomic systems of late – systems like del.icio.us, Flickr, etc that allow for end user capture, storage and usage of informal, non-standardized metadata – I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight one of the most rewarding aspects of these systems: the inherent, continuing value of this metadata for new and unpredictable purposes.
The reason such systems have been successul to date, in my opinion, is a simple matter of incentive. People storing their bookmarks in del.icio.us, for example, can retrieve those links more easily later by having several ways to look them up. Or they can find new users who link to similar content. Etc. The same principles are visible in Flickr.
But what’s fascinating about these accumulating datastores is the types of personal-business-intelligence like visualization downstream, long after the initial incentives may have worn off, or be taken for granted.
Two cases in point are Ex.tisp.icious, which I’ve written about before, and Mappr, which I haven’t. To illustrate what I mean, see my del.icio.us tags mapped by Ex.tisp.icious here and my poweroutlet (only a partial listing, for some reason) tags on Flickr mapped by Mappr here.
The point here is simple; the volumes of metadata we store today tend to reward us not only in the short term, with immediate payback, but also generate longer term returns – like interest in a savings account – as we discover new and interesting uses for the data downstream. As if I needed any more incentive to use these systems…
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