The author of Web 2.0 research wrote to me that my thoughts about social tagging reminded her about a post by VanderWal. Its an excellent post that pins the sloppiness in our Internet jargon. Thanks for the hint.

VanderWal writes about the differences between the terms collaborative and collective.

Collaborative is consensus seeking and “usually aims at completeness”. It’s when the group of users’ effort is to reach a common agreement about the object in question. This could for example be what tag to use in describing an information object. Many studies of folksonomies has this approach about the users tags.

The collaborative approach reminds me Hidderley & Rafferty’s (1997) presentation of the concept of democratic indexing.
Democratic indexing is where a group of users are given a set of keywords describing an information object. The users then chose the keywords which best reflect their view of the information objects. The keywords chosen are then piled into a set and presented to other users, who chose which of these keywords the prefer. Democratic indexing is thus a reconciliation process, where users collaborative chose the terms used in indexing (Lancaster, 2003, p. 12).

Back to VanderWals post…
Collective is when each users perception of the information object is important.

“The [information] object is the focus of collective, the individual’s voices and annotations are held separate as each individual is working as an individual.”

This describes an approach that I find much more interesting. I think that it is in collective approach, we really can tab in to the full potential of folksonomies. I am interested in utilizing the power of folksonomies without disregarding each user’s individual choices (tags). The user’s choice of one term over another constitutes a decision based on the user’s interest, context and overall preferences. The terms chosen by the users encode different meaning. User’s who add the same tags to a resource, must be interested in the same information tagged by others with the same tag. Shirky gives an example of people interested in motion pictures, some describe their interest as film, others movies or cinema. The point is, according to Shirky (2005) that it should be this way, because “[the] movie people do not want to hang around cinema people”.

References
Hidderley, R. & Rafferty, P. (1997) Democratic indexing: an approach to the retrieval of fiction. In: Information service and use. 17 (2-3). p. 101-109.

Lancaster, F. W. (2003). Indexing and abstracting in theory and practice. London, Facet.

Shirky, C. [2005]. Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags. In: Clay Shirky’s Writings about the Internet Economics & Culture, Media & Community, Open Source. URL: http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html