Week 8 Board Discussions

Author: Gwyneth Peaty
Date: Saturday, October 17, 2009 7:09:34 PM WST
Subject: Official Thread: Readings, Tagging and Folksonomies

Welcome to Topic 2.4: Content Sharing. Here are a few questions to start us off:After reading the articles, what do you understand to be the characteristics of a folksonomy?

 

What do you consider to be the benefits and limitations of using tags to organise information?

Weinberger states that traditional taxonomies put together by experts are “necessarily infested with personal, class, and cultural biases.” Do you believe folksonomies offer a way of organising information that is free of these biases?

In his discussion of ‘desire lines,’ Mathes argues that “the most important strength of a folksonomy is that it directly reflects the vocabulary of users.” Do you think the tagging system is most useful to those users who share similar ways of understanding and classifying information?

As always, please feel free to discuss and/or critique anything that catches your interest in the articles, lecture and course materials.

 

I found to begin with this subject confusing, not being 100% sure about the meaning of the words taxonomy and folksonomy. However, the Mathes reading was very helpful in clarifying the terms for me. Having the words related to real life examples that I have used such as Delicious and Flickr made it a lot easy to come to my own conclusions.

Previously I had heard of taxonomy with relation to Bloom’s Taxonomy, which is heavily used in education, a hierarchy of questions asked to students when beginning to learn something new.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_Taxonomy

With my limited knowledge currently, a folksonomy to me is basically where users add keywords to images, movies, links etc. These keywords or tags are searchable and offer a more diverse categorisation system. One benefit to this style of organising information with tags is that you may be able to find keywords that you never knew about for that search. Related keywords can be very handy in finding alternate information. On the other handy a problem can arise with anyone adding irrelevant tags, polluting the results.

I think that one of the great concepts of a folksonomy is that it can be used to educate. For example, say  I was to go to Delicious and do a search for tags, not really knowing what they are. The third link I get when I search is a Clay Shirky article. Looking at the other tags I would soon realise that other related words include folksonomy, metadata and others. Therefore, using a folksonomy is a good way to educate yourself on differing keywords.

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Author: Gwyneth Peaty
Date: Saturday, October 17, 2009 7:05:54 PM WST
Subject: Official Thread: Copyright, Mashups and Memes

 

Having a good understanding of copyright laws and the Creative Commons will be very important as you put together your Web Presence. This work is not only an assignment, but an online creation visible to everyone and therefore subject to copyright laws. Make sure you pay close attention to the course material on this topic!

A few questions:

After reading the material and watching the videos this week, what is your opinion of copyright as it is used in relation to creative works? Is it reasonable to control access to this material? Who seeks this kind of control and for what reason?

How do you view the mashup genre in relation to copyright?

(There are many examples of non-digital ‘mashups’ that you can find. A contemporary example is Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), which you may have seen in shops recently.)

Did you recognize any of the internet memes listed? What might the spread and mutation of these memes suggest about online communities?

I think there defiantly needs to be some form of copyright, especially on the Web. The problem I see is that the sheer volume of websites that a company would have to police is too large.

 

There is a lot of talk about the negative side such as content theft and breaking copyright. However, a progressive business would look at mashups and see it as an opportunity. Allowing anyone access to their content may uncover the next big writer, director or musician, you never know what is out there.

Author: Sky Croeser
Date: Thursday, November 5, 2009 5:05:47 PM WST
Subject: RE: Official Thread: Copyright, Mashups and Memes

On your first point: do you think that there’s any point having laws if they can’t be enforced? And, on a related point, do you think it’s possible to develop enforceable copyright law for the digital age?

There is most defiantly a point to having laws, however, the main problem is and always will be the enforcement of the law. I would hope that there is a way to get these laws enforced and one idea may be to target the hosting companies. They could also apply a confiscation law where the domain name is taken down.