Previous Posts:
- Introduction
- Relationship Traits
- Making It Happen


Up to this point, I’ve written about what “metafolksonomy” is, how it is defined by our relationships with one another and how we might practically integrate this into our daily interactions within the social web.  The potential uses for a system that could help to organize and maintain contacts is large.  By interacting with each other, over time, we could build these great profiles that would let us find other people that we connect with; call it “crowdsourcing the crowd”.   But there are always pitfalls to new ideas.


Can People Benefit from Ratings Like Products?

What if the crowd doesn’t favor you?  People are not always going to find you interesting.  What if you were tagged as a “hypocrite” because of something you did during a single relationship with someone else?  If you translate this to the marketing world, research shows that people actually want to see some negativity in reviews and ratings because they find the product’s assessment to be more believable.  Is this true for people?  If not, why?

One thought to help combat the impact that a negative tag is weighting tags based on comments.  If you have 50 tags of “hypocrite” then maybe that’s more true to your nature than if you just had one tag, who may just be an old ex-girlfriend trying to lash out at you.  Think about a tag cloud representation and it becomes clear.


Sponsoring Profiles Might Be Next

How hard, then, would it be to sponsor favorable tags for certain individuals?  Maybe a stealthy PR group pays a firm to sponsor tags for a political candidate.  Suddenly the human tag cloud is skewed and people searching for a given hot topic from within a certain geographical area find a political candidate in their area instead of legitimate friends to connect with.


Search is Your Friend (and Your Enemy)

“Transparency” and “openness” seem to be emerging concepts as we dive deeper into the social space.  What would a metafolksonomic system of publicly identifying your persona do to the human interaction and relationship process?  If I could search and find someone that was a good match for my personality, how would our first few interactions change?  I’d have a whole host of information before I met you – would I be less interested in digging deeper to see if the “taggers” had missed something?

How about the longevity of this information being available?  What if I change over time and lose bad habits that I’m tagged with?  Surely, that needs to be reflected in my profile, but how?  Do we weight present-day information higher so that older tags get “stale”?


Are We Ready?

You tell me.  I see great benefit in this concept and yet approach it with intrepidation.  Just as the privacy conversation has been expanded due to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s comments in January about privacy not being a “social norm” anymore, so too can the conversation about how much we want to allow others to help define us.  Metafolksonomy is the utmost in social. -- it’s classifying the classifiers.  It’s a thought that goes beyond tagging events, places and websites.  This is not rating a dining spot for its al fresco seating.  It’s rating you.

Are you ready for us to hold you up?

(Photo by Billie Joe's Entourage, modified with permission)