folkstagen

Anil Dash: Accountability and Culture in a Loosely Coupled World

2005-11-30T13:56:00.000-05:00

Anil Dash: Accountability and Culture in a Loosely Coupled World:

So, to the point at hand: Technorati's invented a system of public aggregation. There's prior art, certainly, since at least 3 others had made taggregator applications. But mindshare makes a big difference, and Technorati's arrival here reflects that. Now I'm curious: How will this affect weblog culture? And since the service is new, how can it be changed or evolved to influence people to be more, well, social?

An interesting look at the social questions surrounding tagging as it relates to blogging. Anil dash is an executive at Six Apart, and extremely influential company in the blogging world. They are responsible for the Movable Type blogging package and the TypePad hosted blogging service, a fee-based competitor to Blogger's Blogspot.

Ontology of Folksonomy

2005-11-30T13:52:00.000-05:00

Ontology of Folksonomy

Very interesting essay by Tom Gruber that gets to what I am coming to believe is a central point in the tagging debate:

The attack on "ontology" is really an attack on top down categorization as a way of finding and organizing information, and the praise for folksonomy is really the observation that we now have an entirely new source of data for finding and organizing information: user feedback. For the task of finding information, taxonomies are too rigid and purely text-based search is too weak. Tags introduce distributed human intelligence into the system.

The problem is that the anti-ontology camp misses the point (And does so "so beautifully", as the article puts it.) Gruber posits that the tagging enterprise is a systems engineering problem, not a classification one. Well worth reading.

The challenge of tagging

2005-11-30T13:32:00.000-05:00

So what is the significance of tagging for the librarian?

For the more radical thinkers in the tagging space, folksonomies represent a revolution in the knowledge classification - as emergent, evolutionary ontology rather than the authority based systems we have had in the past. To these writers, Clay Shirky chief among them, tagging rings the death knell for the traditional systems of library classification, replaced by a fluid system of self-created categories that evolve with use.

The question is essentially one of centralization. What works better - a swarm of "virtual catalogers" all tagging away towards some rough consensus, or a centralized authoritarian body classifying to a strict schema, a "priesthood" of information? Does the system evolve from the top-down, or bottom-up?

For many in the library world, this is understandably their worst nightmare. Librarians are not to be faulted for feeling as though the hard-won lessons of the profession are in danger of being swept away on yet another rising tide of revolutionary rhetoric. The organization of knowledge is the very fundament of the library profession. If librarians are nothing else, they have been the keepers of the Great Outline of human knowledge.

So is the profession doomed? My guess is that, as with so many other areas condemned to death by the technological pundits, we will eventually see a middle ground. While we can't expect to see people start tagging their posts with Dewey numbers, we can perhaps hope to see some agreement and refinement of the universe of tags. Such a step would perhaps limit the bottom-up, emergent nature of folksonomy. In the long run it could provide a rudimentary authority, increasing its utility and efficiency as an information resource.

Tagazon

2005-11-16T06:22:00.000-05:00

You’re It! - Amazon Tagging:

Have I been asleep at the wheel? I was browsing Amazon this morning looking for a replacement filter for my Philips coffeemaker (and not having much luck) and I noticed an entry box at the top of a listing enabling site visitors to add tags.

I'm not quite sure what possible utility this could have beyond "Me too!" - but amazon is a pretty clever company and I'm sure they must have some purpose in mind. Off the top of my head it could be yet another aspect to the recommendations engine - "Here's what other people have tagged with 'creole cooking.'"

Technorati Tags: folksonomies, tagging

Where Tagging Works: Searching for a Good Game

2005-11-07T06:58:00.000-05:00

Where Tagging Works: Searching for a Good Game:
The problem with the web, of course, is that most web authors aren't trained information professionals nor do they use a controlled vocabulary when creating tags. Combine that with the subversive use of metadata by spammers to manipulate search engine rankings, and you know why search engines have virtually ignored metadata since day one.
Apparently not everyone has unequivocally accepted tags as a panacea.

aus.picio.us

2005-11-03T15:27:00.000-05:00

Absolutely del.icio.us

En.ormo.us (ok, ok) collection of various tools and hacks for del.icio.us, continually updated. Looks great, but it could take hours to go through them all.

Boxes and Arrows: Ambient Findability: Talking with Peter Morville

2005-11-02T16:44:00.000-05:00

Boxes and Arrows: Ambient Findability: Talking with Peter Morville:

People have been predicting the end of hierarchy since the beginning of hierarchy. But it’s not going away. In fact, I dedicate a whole chapter to explore the hyperbole that swirls around social software and the Semantic Web. I make the case for a “sociosemantic web” that relies on the pace-layering of ontologies, taxonomies, and folksonomies to learn and adapt as well as teach and remember.

Interesting article from someone with a foot in each camp. Peter Morville wrote Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, often popularly called the "Polar Bear" because of the animal on its cover. Ambient Findability, his new book, looks to be a good read for anyone looking at the new self-organizing hierarchies.

Tag Coups

2005-10-20T21:55:00.000-04:00

Since you add a number of Flock URLs as favorites as you get it
configured, those URLs have soared in the del.icio.us popularity
rankings today. As I write this, Flock-based URLs are 4 out of the top
10 at http://del.icio.us/popular/ and the top 3. Not to mention that a enormous number of new WordPress.com blogrolls and blogs just sluiced into the blogosphere.

Flock

2005-10-20T21:42:00.000-04:00

Tagging, integrated into the browser: Flock is a new Firefox-based browser with interesting del.icio.us support built in: Your del.icio.us bookmarks are your favorites in Flock, and tagging is built directly into the browser interface. It also provides direct blogging tools; I am editing this post in Flock itself, not in Blogger's web interface. This is in beta, but this is already a fantastic tool and may be the killer app for tagging.

apophenia: articles on tagging (help?)

2005-10-19T10:26:00.000-04:00

apophenia: articles on tagging (help?):

excellent roundup of articles on tagging, with even more suggestions in the comments. An ongoing resource.

Technorati Tags: folksonomies, tagging

Autotagging

2005-10-12T09:57:00.000-04:00

Tagyu :: Your tags, smarter:

You enter some text or a URL, and the site suggests appropriate tags. I'm seeing a lot of tools that try to automate authorities and thus solve one of the big problems of tagging - the wild disparity in tags. Also see lazy sheep, a bookmarklet that purports to automatically tag and describe your bookmarks. I've tried lazy sheep, and it seems pretty simplistic in terms of its assignments. I don't know what the logic is, but if I had to guess I'd say it's based on word lists and associations.

Rashmi Sinha has some interesting objections to lazy sheep. One is that it "dilutes" the value of del.icio.us by trying to force a homogeneity of tagging onto all users. He's right, I think, and his point illustrates one of the major tensions at the heart of tagging: audience.

The main difference between tagging and library classification is that tagging attempts to be simultaneously idiosyncratic and collective. In other words, del.icio.us wants to serve as a centralized store for your bookmarks, tagged the way you see it, while also serving as the OPAC for the Web. Lazy sheep is definitely on the OPAC side of the fence.

Technorati Tags: blogging, folksonomies, tagging

Shirky on Ontology

2005-10-08T11:20:00.000-04:00

Shirky: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags:
I also want to convince you that what we're seeing when we see the Web is actually a radical break with previous categorization strategies, rather than an extension of them. The second part of the talk is more speculative, because it is often the case that old systems get broken before people know what's going to take their place. (Anyone watching the music industry can see this at work today.) That's what I think is happening with categorization.
Clay Shirky is the most radical voice with regards to tagging. He is convinced that formal classification as we know it is a doomed system, given its basis in a model of centralized authority. This is a good introduction to his thinking on the subject, though he has also written extensively elsewhere.

Technorati Tags: folksonomies, tagging

Visual tagging

2005-10-06T12:40:00.000-04:00

In beta at CNET:

http://beta.news.com.com/The+Big+Picture/2030-12_3-5843390.html?

Interesting. Sort of an interactive concept map. Fun using it to browse CNET's ontology. Though it doesn't use tags or folksonomies, I could easily see this working with del.icio.us or Technorati's tags.

Reinventing the wheel?

2005-10-06T11:23:00.000-04:00

Wired News: Tips for Top Taggers
After a few months of storing bookmarks online with tools like del.icio.us, many people find the tags they've used to categorize them are a hopeless mess. So what are the best methods for getting your tag taxonomy in order?

This article highlights the 2 main problems I see with tagging: the first is overclassification. People are trying to think of every possible tag that might fit a bookmark; what results is dilution of the overall effectiveness of tagging as signal-to-noise in a category gets stretched thin.

The second is inconsistency in tagging, both on a personal level and in the broader system. Tagging works best when you define a set of tags and stick to them, i.e. subject headings. It makes sense to use generally agreed-upon tags, especially if you're looking to gain influence in the social bookmarking world. But that very same influence-seeking can also result in overtagging as you try to game the system and get your bookmarks seen in as many categories as possible.

This is a major difference between cataloging and tagging - cataloging isn't a competition.

Tag Campers

2005-10-05T09:42:00.000-04:00

HomePage - Kwiki:

Tag Camp is an open, welcoming event for geeks to camp out overnight, get wired on Halloween candy and think really fast about tagging, its applications, and implications. It’s like Tag Tuesday but instead it's at Commercenet's beautiful Palo Alto office, featuring luxurious showers.

Combination social event and brainstorming session. All that candy could be dangerous though.

Technorati Tags: folksonomies, tagging

Particletree · Tagging Roundup

2005-10-05T09:30:00.000-04:00

Particletree · Tagging Roundup:
Whether you’re a novice or veteran, the following resources will help you understand how tags are quickly changing the Internet one word at a time.
Good set of introductory articles on tagging.

Technorati Tags: folksonomies, tagging