This site was in maintenance mode for a good part of the evening due to an incompatibility with WP 2.3.1 and the previous theme used here on Techblog. I spent some time trying to work out the problems but the breakage was pretty severe so i figured it was time to either design something new from scratch, or just grab one of the many readily available WP themes and use that for a while. I decided to go for the latter choice.. i might still spend some time adding more customizations, but for now i needed something that worked well and looked clean.

Anyway, after trying out a bunch of themes from the WP Theme Viewer and playing around with the WP Theme Generator, i was able to narrow my choices down to about 5 themes and finally went with the blog.txt theme by Scott.

I’ve already made some SEO related modifications to the header.php template file. Also, i had to upgrade my tags structure – twice! Once from some really old wordpress tagging plugin that kept your tags in a key called: ttaglist, in the postmeta table. I had to use the UTW plugin to import these old tags. Then came the second upgrade. I used the new built-in tag import feature in WP 2.3.1 to convert my newly created UTW tags into the native WP tagging structure. Everything seemed to go smoothly, and i was able to get rid of all my old tagging plugins and install Simple Tags for advance tag management. I had to get rid of a few other really old plugins, but the site runs much faster now, and i’m sure it won’t take me too long to find a ton of new plugins to clutter up my site in no time!

So far, i have to say, i’m pretty happy with the upgrades. I haven’t tested everything too thoroughly yet, so more changes might still be on the horizon.. including another complete theme change. Just giving you all heads up!

The first line went something like this: “Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords.”

Not a good start. I’m thinking, “great. now i have to look up neologism”. So i did (but i won’t get into it you can read about it here).

If you read a bit further, the wikipedia says that folksonomy “refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories”. We see this type of thing happening all over the web, and if you use it regularly, chances are you’re already part of one. Some of the more popular examples of these include internet based softwares like Flickr, del.icio.us and Technorati which allow small communities of people to apply tags to posts, pictures, bookmarks, and just about anything else you can think of. The end result is usually a set of searchable keywords or topics that are all in some way loosely related to the subject matter.

The term folksonomy has been attributed to Thomas Vander Wal and is a combination of the words folk (or people) and taxonomy (which itself comes from the Greek words “taxis” and “nomos” – meaning classification and management). Put it all together and you’ve got “people’s classification management”[wikipedia].

This system is sometimes considered to be more flexible than conventional forms of hierarchical organization, because it doesn’t force content to be classified under a fixed set of categories. Furthermore, “advocates of folksonomy believe it produces results that reflect more accurately the population’s conceptual model of the information” [wikipedia]. There is a growing debate surrounding the subject of folksonomy with regards to tags versus traditional categories. Each side argues the benefits of either a Many-to-Many, or a Many-to-One based system. I think that ultimately it will be these new communities who decide what is most useful, and there is nothing that any 1 person can do about. It’s happening already, these people are the most vocal (on the web), they have the tools and they’re going to use them.

Flexibility is the key to all of this and it seems to be essential when it comes to managing large amounts of data.

Tags are simply more flexible than traditional categories, and by that i mean: Tags can do both.

They can be used loosely or in a strict (traditional category) sense. People who worry about order, structure, hierarchy, can still use tags. One tag per item, just like a category. Others, can go ahead and tag away to their hearts content. And if you’re like me you can even use both.

But you just can’t do that with categories. When something doesn’t fit into a fixed set of categories, out of frustration, we are forced to create a new category.. then another, and another, and so on. As the list of categories grows, it’s only a matter of time until you’re faced with an item that could easily fit into two or more categories. Many of the categories seem similar, and the solution this time is to classify the content under more than one category. Once you’ve taken this step though, you could already be considered tagging. The structure begins to collapse, categories as a system of classification begins to lose meaning. There seems to be a logical progression here that isn’t easy to deny. It just feels like the natural evolution of things to me.

So from my perspective, the debate was over before it began.

References:

1. Wikipedia definition of: folksonomy
2. Article: Many-to-Many: Folksonomy