With the explosion of user contribution in Web 2.0, the issue of how to glean value from user contribution has emerged. Peter Morville analyzes a number of strategies for doing so.
In this fourteen and a half minute podcast (download iPod compatible, 76MB), Peter Morville and I discuss the veritable explosion in user contributions that has taken place in the past few years. Noted examples include flickr, a photo sharing site, and youtube, the video sharing site. A recurring issue with media files in particular is how to organize the material so that people can find it. Peter has long been an advocate of using professionals in this role. However, the mass of data is so great that professionals can only classify a small portion of it, leading to various attempts to harness non-professionals. Thomas Vander Wal termed this effort to harness amateur classification "folksonomy", for taxonomy created by folk.
We run through several issues:
- Users don't seem to want to help classify all data. Amazon's attempt to harness user classification for its inventory failed.
- However, Library Thing, which uses Amazon's book data has succeeded, perhaps because users feel they are primarily performing a service for themselves.
- Luis Van Ahn has explored ways to get users to consistently classify image data in ways that they find fun and will do for free.
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