Metadata for the Masses

Many classification systems suffer from an inflexible top-down approach, forcing users to view the world in potentially unfamiliar ways. ...¶... But what if we could somehow peek inside our users’ thought processes to figure out how they view the world? One way to do that is through ethnoclassification... — how people classify and categorize the world around them. We’re beginning to see ethnoclassification in action on the social bookmarks site Del.icio.us, and the photo sharing site Flickr. Both services encourage users to apply their own freely listed tags to content — tags that others can then employ when looking for content. ... adaptive path link This is would seem to have some interesting applicability to the problem of providing a recommendations system for "long tail" audio and video content. --Dennis