I will begin study again this July. I never expected that I would do it this fast, or taking this particular major, and this particular place. I will be taking a master in management with focus in Strategic Marketing, in Bina Nusantara.

Come to think of it, one of my close friends commented why I would, or rather, why many other friends take the same path. You know what? I never expected it as well. I have always wanted Information Design master in Carnegie-Mellon university in the US. Guess what, I’m still on my way for it and if I get the chance I will go. I’ll never stop dreaming.

The reason I am taking this management course lies on the fact that I am working in a marketing area, in a large organization, and the chance to grow to learn something that is wider, but still somehow relates to what I studied. This is the best course imaginable that I could take right now with my time and conditional constraints. I don’t mind taking another master course if the Information Design opportunity comes up. But if not, I still have my management degree.

It has been a tough decision. No other courses in Indonesia really interest me, or allow me the flexibility and ease of access. If there is, they’re design masters in Trisakti and ITB, but they are too far by location, and unsupportive of the working class.

“Onwards” by James Jarvis (via cubicle17)

It was a bland, blue day
When I talked to myself
in a radiance of confidence
That I can not

That I can not feel,
that I can not see
and I can not predict

Immaculate.
That’s how we want
life to be:
Perfect, and pre-manifested.

It simply isn’t.
Life, is serendipity.
It manifests later
when the day ends.

Life wakes up on the past,
lives on the present
and breathes on the future
It is only alive, by then.

Imagine and hope,
Rise and fall.
We think life
isn’t about us.

But then life changes,
In a quick after-hour bliss
And by this moment,
our eternity is true.

for Lintang Ernaningtyas Nugroho

I was researching about folksonomy lately and I thought to collect the thoughts in a concise form I’d write something here.

So what is folksonomy? Literally, it’s a combination between “folk” and “taxonomy”. “Folk” references to the lay, casual people (it is plural). “Taxonomy” refers to a system or convention to classify information. So together, they mean system or convention to classify information that is done by lay people. It’s a term coined by Thomas Vander Wal. Ofcourse that is a rough definition of it. But to my own words, instead of using a professionally or predetermined convention of classification system, we let the masses to classify the streams of information. Sounds difficult? Think tagging on Flickr and Delicious, or Wordpress. Instead of having a systematic hierarchy where users could not influence, tagging allows free flows of characters, words or vocabulary to label an information, thus making it possible for one information to have more than one way to classify it.

One easy comparation is how Yahoo! has always organised information in traditional, systemised, predefined hierarchy. Remember the good old Yahoo! homepage where you had the option to seek for information by the search box or by browsing one of the major categories and narrow down? Compare that to the way Delicious or Flickr organise their own information. Delicious and Flickr do not ask you to follow a fixed trail down the road to find an information. It is still a trail, but is more serendipitous. Surely a different way of finding information than if we were in a public library where we hunt down to the exact fixed place. Information is not stored in a fixed place in folksonomy.

Delicious and Flickr have always been hallmark examples of folksonomy. However, they were not the first. A desktop software from Lotus has apparently used it back in the nineties. A software called Bitzi helped classify digital documents on the Web. In the offline world, we also sometimes tag/label things in our homes randomly. “Clothes” can be tagged “pants” and “shirts” too.

What are the benefits and drawbacks of folksonomy versus taxonomy? Here is a summary:

Benefits

• democracy/freedom to put relevance, primarily personal relevance
• allows for serendipity in information-seeking, providing more possibilities
• bottom-up classification allows for more details
• financially inexpensive to deploy
• cognitively also inexpensive, does not need rocket science
• useful where types and scale of information are grand and random, information organises themselves
• individual and community benefit

Drawbacks

• ambiguity: synonyms, homonyms, plysemies, depth of classification
• can pose threat to efforts in creating a semantic web
• can be very detailed and specific, but is very noisy
• can take a long time to have an established labelling
• possibly hamper search speed in circumstances where speed is important

So that’s all I have for now folks. It’s been a productive read today. I have not implemented tagging myself for this blog, I should start somewhere soon. ;)