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The internet, folksonomy and social direction
There’s an interesting article about the demand for stock images and trends associated with those demands. In summary it is essentially talkign about stock images and the type of images people demand, which display trends in media and society. In many ways the stock imagists are forecasters trying to predict what the next big thing will be so there’s a fresh shot sitting in their database waiting to be the opiate of the masses. The article states “These suppliers of the world’s commercial imagery are making bets on what life will look and feel like in the near future.”
The statistics are compelling also: “Love was at No. 14 in 2006 and cracked the list at No. 10 in 2007, but so far it’s dropped out of the top 25 in 2008 (even though Valentine’s Day has already come and gone). Waggoner’s take: The worsening economy has perhaps booted romance from top-of-mind status. Along the same lines, shopping bag had once been a top 250 term but is now expected to disappear from the top 500 for 2008.”
This tends toward a fascinating phenomenon which sets our current age apart from any other known historical civilisation before us. The concept of folksonomy.
Folksonomy (also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging) is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. In contrast to traditional subject indexing, metadata is generated not only by experts but also by creators and consumers of the content. Usually, freely chosen keywords are used instead of a controlled vocabulary.[1] Folksonomy is a portmanteau of the words folk and taxonomy, hence a folksonomy is a user generated taxonomy. (Wikipedia)
Never before have we had the tools to track in such details social trends in real time as they happen. Data such as the information from Getty images is invaluable. But it also goes further, as it is representing this data that allows wide ranging opportunities. This is something pithy.
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perhaps a more useful bit of commentary (versus my other meandering ‘article’ above), is to direct attention to jonathan harris, and his wordcount artwork. here, harris’s folksonomy places the technology into a user-interface, allowing for creative expression.