Allan FosterFrom taxonomies to folksonomies: personal observations on Online Information 2005I’m an Online veteran having attended my first
‘meeting’, as it was then called, in 1978. So I’ve seen many dimensions of
the online industry as it’s developed over these years as manifested through
this midwinter event. Some ‘Onlines’ are exciting as yet another wave of
technical, human or business change crashes over the industry. Other years seem
fallow by comparison. In the early years of the 21st Century, we’ve
seen the dotcom boom turn so often to bust. We’ve watched the frenzy over
Knowledge Management become mainstreamed into day to day organisational
practice. And this year Online 2005 was dominated by social networking, the
ubiquitous presence, actual or imagined, of Google, and with a fair dose of
content management thrown in to the mix. It was impossible to get away from the impact of
social technologies in the conference halls. From David Weinberger’s
barnstorming opening keynote address, The
new shape of knowledge: everything is miscellaneous, to Jane McConnell and
Mark Estevè final day presentation on making global collaboration work, the
themes of individual and group contributions to knowledge development and
sharing were everywhere. This is a world of blogs,
wikis, tags
and tag clouds and rss
feeds. The key challenge to established dissemination media
posed by social software tools is to the notion of authority. Scientific
communication is based firmly on the principle of quality control through peer
review. Established and reputable journals filter articles submitted to them by
an extensive system of peer review in an attempt to publish only valid science.
The very nature of social and collaborative technology tools is that authority
is earned by the quality of the contribution rather than by the status of the
contributor or their organisation. This is a seductive and exciting line of argument.
But just as Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy
Wales, was speaking to a ‘house full’ audience at the Online Conference,
a storm was about to
engulf him back in the US. Wikipedia is based on the idea that anyone can
anonymously author or amend entries on the web. The downside of this openness
was illustrated by prominent Seigenthaler, 78, claimed that only one sentence in his biography was
correct. After Wales
told him that it was impossible to track down who had authored the piece
Seigenthaler asserted that Wikipedia is “a flawed and irresponsible research tool”.
Wales
has put in place a limited amount of control in the authoring process as a
result of this incident. It turned out to be a
wind-up but the damage had been done. One of
David Weinberger’s many insightful comments in his opening address had a
particular resonance for me. In the latter part of the 1990s there was much talk
about ‘information overload’. Reuters carried out some research and came up
with what seemed to me to be a dubious proposition that executives were actually
becoming seriously stressed at the volume of information they had to handle. I
did a critique of this in Information World Review in 1999 referring to
sociologist Herbert
Simon’s concept of ‘satisficing’. That is, setting an aspiration level
with which, if achieved, they will be happy enough. On the same lines, Weinberger talked
about most peoples’ information seeking behaviour as being ‘good enough’.
‘Information anxiety’ is a fallacy – its official. He also came up with the best metaphor of the
Conference. “Think of knowledge not as trees with a formal, defined and linear
structure but as piles of leaves.” He celebrated the messiness of knowledge
and argued that taxonomies had their place but not in singular terms. Everyone
could now help to classify knowledge by techniques such as tagging. Read more
about his ideas on Joho
the Blog. In the same arena, Manchester-born US citizen Peter Morville, information architect and librarian, talked about folksonomies, the ability of users to assign free terms to pieces of information as illustrated in web services such as the photosharing site Flickr, the bookmarking site Del.icio.us or the news site Digg. Specifically, he described ‘ambient findability’, the nexus of search, wayfinding, marketing, information interaction, literacy, librarianship, authority and culture. One of the most surprising and uplifting of the messages coming through this collaborative, social technology is the willingness of some corporations to encourage the use of these techniques both within and outside the boundaries of the organization. For instance, Phillipe Borremans described the open and creative attitude of IBM, where he is their PR Manager for Belgium & Loxembourg, to the use of blogging. There is a well understood and explicit corporate blogging policy and guidelines to assist IBM staff but this isn’t stultifying. Staff use their blogs for a variety of purposes – personal journals and musings, sharing items of interest, evangelizing new ideas, and describing work in progress. This is risky stuff and will stick in the craw of many companies more concerned with image management than creative communication and knowledge exchange. Like all fashions, the profile of social networking will become less prominent at future Online Information Conferences (and Exhibitions). These technologies and techniques will be absorbed into the rich cocktail that is the online industry. And Online Information remains the world’s biggest and most authoritative view of that industry. December 2005 |