In the other article for this week's readings, Wichowski mentioned ways to "standardize" social tagging, for the betterment of all users; she brought up terms like "tag training" and "educating users about tag literacy", as well as "linking folksonomies with ontologies," which all sounds well and good ... unless you're like me and think that "regular" users (i.e. amateur content organizers) will never expend the time or effort to partake in such things, at least not in the numbers necessary to make such an endeavor worthwhile.
Not to be cynical, but I've always felt that regular users are going to tag their pictures/bookmarks/videos with whatever keywords suit their needs - even if those tags are factually incorrect or too specific to be useful to the general population - regardless of how other people may use them. Really, in my mind, I see no scenario in which the everday internet user is going to exert the energy required to "train" themselves in the "correct" forms and standards; if they wanted to go to all that trouble, they would've already been enrolled in library school :)
Therefore, I could have never bought into the idea of the typical internet user taking part in the type of "standardization" described by Wichowski, and thus simply wrote off such initiatives as a pipe dream ... However, after reading Peters and Weller's thoughts on the subject of "tag gardening", I may be coming around to their way of thinking.
If there was a dedicated group of people who would take the time to "optimize tags in a folksonomy data set" after the fact (i.e. evalute the tags created by others for accuracy and correct/re-write them accordingly), then this opens up the possibility for a whole new industry devoted to "tag gardening," which could take up residence in the new information environment and "clean up" those errors that would usually permeate a community's particular folksonomy.
In fact, this could be the new role that future librarians play in helping to organize the online information landscape; instead of simply creating subject headings for books, they could be re-organizing and re-cataloging tags found on sites like Flickr and Delicious!
After all, librarians have the knowledge and training necessary to identify tags beyond the level of simple keywords; while the authors aren't referring to librarians specifically, they seem to be describing our profession when they talk of users who can "manipulate, revise and edit folksonomy tags" to better reflect that information so that it can be useful to the community at large.
For example, they cite a study which found that "users can be influenced by the tags which are already assigned to a resource," and recommended that "a new tagging system might be seeded by its designers with a large set of tags of the preferred type" [emphasis mine] to better guide users on the best tags to adopt ... Maybe it's just me, but librarians sound like the perfect people to step in and use their training to produce these "tags of the preferred type" (in essence, a controlled vocabulary for tagging).
However, it's not enough for librarians to act as "outside observers" of these social-tagging communities, remaining distant and separate from their users ... The authors talk about the process of removing "bad tags" (i.e. the "weeding" aspect of tag gardening) to help improve folksonomies for the purposes of consistency, and that this process of elimination/evaluation should be "handed over to the users themselves."
With this seemingly innocent statement, the authors (unwittingly) touch upon the idea of social capital as it pertains to the librarian-patron relationship, which we have been discussing in class thus far ... In other words, it's not enough for librarians to simply help the users, but they must become the users!
Librarians must familiarize themselves with tools like Flickr and Delicious; they must experiment and manipulate and participate, until they are just as much a part of the community that they are serving as the patrons themselves. In this way, handing the responsibility of optimizing tags in a folksonomy data set over to a librarian ("Their processing should be handed over to the users themselves") will be no different than handing them over to an amateur content organizer; the two become one and the same!
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