These native #openweb activism based projects have been around for the last ten years. In the reboot of #Indymedia and the development of the Open Media Network (#OMN), the challenge of federating metadata flows sits at the heart of how people organize, distribute, and consume media in a decentralized, grassroots-driven native path. We’re navigating the space between #folksonomy (bottom-up, organic tagging) and categories (top-down, structured organization). Each approach offers advantages, but bridging them creatively is key to an effective and open media landscape.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txCLtKpDwNE

Folksonomy vs. Categories:

#Folksonomy is a people and community -driven method of tagging content, allowing communities to organically build a taxonomy that reflects their interests and needs. It’s flexible, dynamic, and rooted in grassroots culture.
* Advantage: Captures the diversity and fluidity of bottom-up organizing.
* Disadvantage: Can be messy, inconsistent, and hard to scale across diverse instances.

#Categories are a structured, hierarchical way of organizing information, providing clarity and consistency.
* Advantage: Easier to search, sort, and maintain across larger networks.
* Disadvantage: Top-down imposition is restrictive and alienate grassroots contributors.

The OMN path: Combining Folksonomy with Categories

The #OMN and the Indymedia reboot are grounded in bottom-up grassroots projects, so we obviously start with a folksonomy approach. However, we recognize there’s some practical use for categories as well. Here’s a draft proposal for how to bridge the divide:

1. Folksonomy First: Every media object enters the OMN network with a set of user-generated tags (folksonomy). These tags represent the grassroots nature of the content—open, fluid, and community-driven.
2. Category Grouping: Allow instances to group folksonomy tags into category clusters. These clusters could be shared across instances, making it easy to adopt community-agreed categories while respecting the folksonomy origin. This means that folksonomy items are not discarded, but instead enhanced by grouping them into more structured categories. The folksonomy items, now part of category groups, flow through the network and can be treated as extra tags, maintaining transparency and openness.
3. Metadata Flow is the project: The OMN is not just a content distribution network but also a metadata flow tool. It allows media objects to move across instances, while each instance can enhance the object’s metadata (tags/categories) in a transparent and open way. The magic here is in building a path where meaning, the media, tags, and categories are fully federated and can flow effortlessly between decentralized nodes.
4. Subscription to Category Flows: Instances can subscribe to category flows, essentially saying, “I want to see all media tagged under a specific category or tag group.” This gives structure without forcing it, enabling diversity of content flow while still benefiting from categorization. This flexible subscription system empowers the grassroots while creating a bridge to more top-down consumption or categorization models.
5. Trust-Based Growth: The entire system is built on trust networks. Instances that trust each other’s tagging and categorization can share media freely, with the assumption that the metadata accompanying it adds value, not friction.

The Philosophy: “Transparency is the New Objectivity”

The OMN is rooted in the philosophy of transparency over objectivity. The flows of metadata, whether from folksonomy or categories, are transparent for to see, remix, and improve upon. This radical openness, guided by the #4opens, ensures that the system remains flexible, accessible, and grounded in the needs of people not corporations. Truth bubbles up from this, lies exist, but they are pushed to their own spaces, which people can choose to ignore.

Conclusion: Building the Age of Creative Anarchy

On a positive, we could say that the 19th century was the age of capitalism, the 20th century was the age of social democracy, and the 21st century could be shaping up to be the age of creative anarchy. In this era, the challenge is to embrace diversity while building tools that help us collaborate across differences. The OMN is a practical tool to move media objects and metadata around in a way that encourages creativity, transparency, and bottom-up control, all while allowing some degree of organization through category flows. This is a positive future for media, that is native to our current openweb reboot as our #fashernista like to call this #opensocialweb but the problem it is what we are doing is not social media… bad choice of naming.

The future is messy, but we can compost this mess into a thriving, decentralized media path. Let’s start with trust, folksonomy, and the #openweb, and grow from there #KISS who is coding this, who is funding this, help needed please as I don’t have the focus to see this through, it needs crew and funding, that might be you.

https://hamishcampbell.com/why-we-need-the-open-media-network-omn/

https://hamishcampbell.com/federating-metadata-flows-bridging-folksonomy-and-categories-for-the-omn/

#4opens #Categories #fashernista #folksonomy #indymedia #KISS #OMN #opensocialweb #openweb

Decided to print a poster from the Pocket article tag co-occurrence network I made a couple of years ago, as it's a pretty good representation of my interests, and my brain too. Forgotten how cool Gephi is (once you remember what you are doing!)

#sna #datascience #folksonomy #dataviz

This is CogDogBlogged: "Maximum Tags: Can You Go 75 TPP?"

Tag, we are it. I love me free form tagging. A bit before there were #hashtags there was the Web2.0 frenzy of folksonomy, and wealth that Wikipedia is, leads me to the birth of a term used quite widely.

It rounds counter to the rigidity and forced rules of Official Metadata, in that people, groups, mobs, make free form organizational classifications. It’s at play here on this blog, and […]

https://cogdogblog.com/2024/09/maximum-tags/

#cogdogblog #dailycreates #ds106 #flickr #folksonomy #hashtags #tagging

Computers are great for sorting fir searching, and some types of storage.

A physical item could have more than 2 pages of Metadata. Taxonomies, folksonomies, with tagging and keywords and more, oh my!

But which do you use to actually find the physical object. The location, where it's located?

And what if you use that one yourself, but someone else chooses something different?

#z_lib #z_lib_cataloging #Folksonomy #Taxonomy #Storage

SUMMARY of replies (some comments are mine) to my question about an #LLM-free #searchEngine

- #kagi, paid, but some comments and a thorough article criticize it (also, LLM)
https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

- #qwant more european-, less USA-centered but not in browsers search bar https://www.qwant.com/

- #SearXNG #opensource metasearch (aggregator) https://docs.searxng.org but is "just" a layer on top.

- Yandex and Baidu: these are based in countries with strong Internet filtering (see "Government Internet filtering in practice" in https://v-dem.net/data_analysis/MapGraph/ )

I still have a soft spot for #folksonomy as a social solution. Wikipedia -like. nobody revamped that?
@joeo10 @andreagrandi @adorabilis @artfulrobot @nixCraft

I like #hashtags because they're a successful #folksonomy. but they've got some big flaws. ⓵ no description or summary or anything. catching a new tag can be *work* just to figure out what it means sometimes. ⓶ no proximity. eg: I'd like to be able to tag plus codes (OLC) and have people looking for a larger area also find my specific toot. there are lots of ways that toots and tags may be adjacent to each other.

One of my holy grail software quests is a community tagging (aka #folksonomy) plugin for #WordPress. The idea is that users/readers could add #tags to posts and/or images.

When WordPress was very young, there were several #CommunityTagging plugins in the WordPress plugins directory. Only one remains, long unmaintained and broken. https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-folksonomy/#description

If you know a #plugin for this, please sing out!

Boosts very welcome in hope of getting this seen by as many Wordpress mavens as possible.

a few more #hashtags

#folksonomy or #folk
#spacetime
#landings
#sightings
#drumcircle
#interstellar
#Ritual or #rite
#memory
#archeoastronomy
#extraterrestrial
#griot

Just noticed my #Android 13 little glowing rectangle offers #hashtags to search its myriad of settings. I'm finding this feature helpful. Who could've imagined how many different ways tags would wind up getting used, eh @chrismessina? #folksonomy #indexing #folksonomyIndexing

@bearking thank you for the suggestion. I spent the day fiddling with tiddlers and just couldn't improve upon the #Obsidian system I developed last year. Being able to add in-text #folksonomy tags anywhere in a record makes it so easy to interconnect the flat files into a flexible database that can evolve over time.

So, with my #InformationArchitecture head on -- by using a combo of the pinned post, edit function, and the hashtag #folksonomy it should be possible to create a #Tumblr/#Stumbleupon index post for things like listing all of one's about/intro posts, or photography, gardening, WHY.

Wondering if this already exists, or is something people do. & whether it's possible to do a user/tag type link to filter posts.

Or if it would involve bodging things ala #[DistinctUserident]_[TopicTag]

[[instagram problem]]
---
RT @hillelogram
But even good actors go heavy on the tags, because nobody's curating any of the tags and you have no idea which ones people use. I call this the Instagram Problem

#tag #tags #tagging #label #labels #tagsystems #taxonomies #folksonomy #hashtags #taggerlyfe #taggerlifestyle
https://twitter.com/hillelogram/status/1534301390020960256

Comparison of Tag Cloud Layouts: Task-Related Performance and Visual Exploration
(2009) : Steffen Lohmann and J{\"u}rgen Ziegler and Lena Tetzlaff
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03655-2_43
#HCI #folksonomy #information_foraging #prototype #ta
#my_bibtex

Social Informatics
(2011) : Datta, Anwitaman
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24704-0
#MMO #belief #computational_social_science #context #crowd_source #data_mining #digital_media #folksonomy #governance #group_dynamics #guilds #health_care #in
#my_bibtex

Independent #Security Consultant, #Developer
My pronouns are he/him, I also like they/them
I love #education #mashups #folksonomy
I am #vegan
And am currently working with creating and modifying #hardware

#introduction

@hyperrealgopher Hashtags are quick and lightweight but also unintuitive, often inconsistent, and cannot be combined for search in most cases. See #folksonomy for issues.

Date and author are two classic approaches, though of limited use. Date can cut down a larger set of articles. Author is mostly meaningless on a single-user blog.

Full-text search is powerful but can get lost in noise, relevance, context, or significance. It's also hard to provide for many systems.

Topic, Subject, Place, or Personal Name indices can be useful if appropriate to context, but require instrumenting or compiling.

Project is handy for work that self-organises this way, though determining what a project is, or the boundaries between them, can be tricky.

Formal ontologies (such as library subject classifications) are powerful and complete but often unweildy, and few are freely available. They help avoid DIY organisational blunders, though they inherit their creating organisation's failings.

2/3

I started out using Huffduffer to collect a handful of podcast interviews with LynneKelly on her work with mnemonics, but noticed a handful of others that had already been using various tags like “memory” and “mnemonics” on the service as well. While I know there are some podcasts dedicated directly to memory, most of the ones I’ve tagged/highlighted in my list are one-off episodes or radio interviews that stand alone. I’ve also gone through a few past posts on the forum about podcast episodes relating to memory and tagged them as well. I’ve seen a dozen or so other posts on the forum here in which people have mentioned particular podcasts, so I’ll mention that Huffduffer is a great audio-based web tool for finding, discovering, and collecting audio content. It also provides iTunes subscribe-able audio feeds for every account, collective, and even tag on the site. If you’re interested in the topic of “mnemonics” you can subscribe to the public RSS feed on Huffduffer and you’ll automatically be updated in your podcatcher of choice whenever anyone else in the community uses Huffduffer and tags an audio file with the same “mnemonics” tag. Happy listening and collecting. https://boffosocko.com/2019/12/14/an-informal-mnemonics-podcast/

It almost sounds like Dr. Samuel could be looking for the IndieWeb community, but just hasn’t run across it yet. Since she’s writing about tags, I can’t help but mischievously snitch tagging it to her, though I’ll do so only in hopes that it might make the internet all the better for it. Tagging systems were “folksonomies:” chaotic, self-organizing categorization schemes that grew from the bottom up. ❧ There’s something that just feels so wrong in this article about old school tagging and the blogosphere that has a pullquote meant to encourage one to Tweet the quote. #irony –December 04, 2019 at 11:03AM I find it interesting that Alexandra’s Twitter display name is AlexandraSamuel.com while the top of her own website has the apparent title @AlexandraSamuel. I don’t think I’ve seen a crossing up of those two sorts of identities before though it has become more common for people to use their own website name as their Twitter name. Greg McVerry is another example of this. Thanks to Jeremy Cherfas[1] and Aaron Davis[2] for the links to this piece. I suspect that Dr. Samuel will appreciate that we’re talking about this piece using our own websites and tagging them with our own crazy taxonomies. I’m feeling nostalgic now for the old Technorati… https://boffosocko.com/2019/12/04/what-happened-to-tagging-jstor-daily/

Alexander Samuel reflects on tagging and its origins as a backbone to the social web. Along with RSS, tags allowed users to connect and collate content using such tools as feed readers. This all changed with the advent of social media and the algorithmically curated news feed. ❧ Tags were used for discovery of specific types of content. Who needs that now that our new overlords of artificial intelligence and algorithmic feeds can tell us what we want to see?! Of course we still need tags!!! How are you going to know serendipitously that you need more poetry in your life until you run into the tag on a service like IndieWeb.xyz? An algorithmic feed is unlikely to notice–or at least in my decade of living with them I’ve yet to run into poetry in one. –December 04, 2019 at 10:56AM https://boffosocko.com/2019/12/04/what-happened-to-tagging-read-write-collect/