Comments on: Folksonomic Interface Development

By: Jenny

Jenny — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:50:09 +0000

@vanderwal
Thank you for linking me to your definition.

From how I understand it, the folksonomy is the *result* of collective tagging. Is that correct?

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Personalisation is obviously something that has always been considered important by interface designers.

It’s interesting to see the emergence of personalisation of web pages that have traditionally been ’static’ through services such as iGoogle. Now the BBC homepage [bbc.co.uk] is customisable the concept of personalising web pages is in the public consciousness (in the UK at least).

The questions I have are:

1. If an application program allowed you to alter the fundamental GUI would anyone do it?

Bearing in mind limited customisation is already available in application programs that are in daily use (MS Word etc). Will the popularisation of customisable web pages make people expect to be able to customise *everything*?

And,

2. How would you design an interface that was totally re-designable by the user?

I realise this isn’t an example of a folksonomy but – as an aside – what term describes the result of a collective alteration of interface?

By: vanderwal

vanderwal — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 01:24:31 +0000

You picked up on Wikipedia when the folksonomy definition of incredibly wrong. Folksonomy is the opposite of collaborative tagging, in fact I coined it to separate it from collaborative tagging. There is a continued confusion between collective and collaborative and Wikipedia has captured that misunderstanding well. For a better understanding try, http://vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html

What you are looking for in your quest is personalization that can be shared as a theme or interface. This exact thing is done in MySpace and with tools with WordPress. It has been common for many years pre-web going back to Windows themes shared from Windows 95 onward.

By: Jenny

Jenny — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:31:46 +0000

Lots of food for thought – thanks guys!

The cityofsound.com blog looks fascinating.

By: James Stewart

James Stewart — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:52:56 +0000

Do/have you read cityofsound? Some of Dan’s writings on adaptability and hackability of software, hardware and urban environments resonate with this. I can’t remember which would be the key entries there but

http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2006/05/architecture_an.html
and http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2005/01/adaptation_pers.html would be a good start

By: Benjamin

Benjamin — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:19:13 +0000

What would be cool (and I’ve been playing with it a bit) is to use a lexical approach. If you could relate tags (thesaurus?) and create a hierarchy in tags, you could do some pretty cool stuff.

This was how the nomothetic approach to personality evolved (grouping traits).

Anything similar in the tagging world already?

By: Jake Rayson

Jake Rayson — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 13:47:40 +0000

You’ve probably come across the ‘folksonomic’ CSS naming convention discussion amongst Eric Meyer, Andy Clarke et al:

But I’ve posted it here anyway