Facetag and twentysomethings...

I'm starting to read this book that my boyfriend's grandmom got him called Twentysomething essays by Twentysomething writers. The essays were chosen as part of a Random House contest and in the note from the editors, they relate the complexity of trying to group and organize the thousands of entries they received because in the end each essay could, in one way or another, fit into each of their preconceived categories.

"The problem was that such “everything-ness” seemed to spoil any claims of twentysomething solidarity. Our generation has often been accused of political apathy, of lacking the unity of ideology and purpose that the Boomers—our parents—were so famous for. According to popular opinion, we are all supposed to be deeply polarized by the Red/Blue divide. But, in reality, the spectrum is much wider and more colorful. We are not apathetic; we’ve simply learned to make more subtle distinctions."

It's these subtle distinctions that make the finding, collocating and evaluation of information, especially on the web, extremely difficult.

FaceTag is a prototype for a new tool that combines the benefits of folksonomic tagging with faceted classification. Folksonomy tagging is the process whereby users label items with their own keywords such as the labels I use below each post on this blog, or on YouTube and Flickr. Some of the issues with tagging is that it can be inexact or overly personalized, for instance I may label this post as "fun" but you might find it to be "awful".

Faceted classification on the other hand analyzes items by distinct characteristics which can then be divided into subclasses. FaceTags facets are Resource Types, Language, Activities/Subjects, Usage, People, Date. As tags become connected to these characteristics, browsing and searching becomes richer.