Design in the Wild: American Science and Surplus – a folksonomy gone bad

by Alex Rainert on March 28, 2008 · Comments

in Design in the Wild, Social, Thoughts

Folksonomy gone bad (and useless)

This is an example of the risk you always run when you let your users run wild without a sense of controlled (or suggested) vocabulary. Here we’ve got lots of what looks like usernames and a bunch of gobbledygook – neither of which is particularly useful to the rest of the community.

Don’t let that discourage you from checking out the site, though. There’s a ton of cool stuff at American Science and Surplus. Seems like a place I would have loved as a kid.

Tagged as: screenshot

  • I love how this just looks like graffiti.
    People on the site are using the folksonomy to bookmark things.
    They're literally tagging their name to items so they can find them later; most items only have two or three and they side towards initials or usernames more than dictionary words.

    This is far more an example of tagging being unnecessary in the first place (there is a tight taxonomy of products present on the site) than it is the audience not knowing how to use it, as there is little to no obvious value in using it properly: what else is there to say about a "Digital Multimeter" categorized in "Electrical Parts > Gauges & Meters" that isn't already evident in all that text? Clearly, the feature that should have been developed first was a Wish List.
  • Some friends at Yahoo and Amazon have indicated that despite the digerati's fascination with tags, people have no idea how to use them or what they mean. Your screenshot shows a lot of just plain keyboard junk, but people tend to write sentences, phrases, captions, dates into these boxes as well. Larger companies can screen out the articles, catch the dates, strip the punctuation, and clean some of them up, but we're a ways away from non-digerati folksonomoies.
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