Larry Lessig decides that since corpses are signing music industry petitions, he must be wrong about copyright… [Tags: larry_lessig digital_rights copyright ]

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Alla Zollers notes that we can tell a lot about a community by looking at its tags. E.g., delicious.com is clearly IT heavy. “Relevance is socially constructed,” she says. I.e., what is relevant changes over time depending on who interacts with it and how they interact it. “Communities form around tags.” [As always, I’m just taking live notes and missing lots.]

Lilly Nguyen thinks of tagging as peer production of knowledge. People think about taggging in terms of production but not use. We have sociological tools that explain some of these but they don’t seek up with Library Information Science. Use of tags is not just about findability and refindability.

I say that I agree that finding and refinding doesn’t cover it. I sometimes tag because I feel like I’m contributing to a tag stream that’s creating knowledge, along with all the human motivations we have for doing things (reputation building, validation, etc.).

Barbara Wildemuth asks why people would use (not create) tags other than finding and refinding. Lilly says she uses tags to discover, to browse, which is different than finding.

Lilly says she worries about tagging overloading us. Someone says we’ll fix it eventually. Lilly says, “So fix it!”

Thomas says that he feeds delicious.com for social reasons—he knows people pay attention to it—but he searches through Yahoo MyWeb because it has features that work better.

Cliff Lampe wonders where the line is between finding systems and recommendation systems. (Thomas likes Ma.gnolia.com.)

Gary Marchionini points out that people tag also because the act of tagging helps memory, just as taking notes does.

Thomas points out that people tag with terms they’ve most recently interacted with.

Jackson Fox says that we transition terms over time. E.g., after tagging pages as “web design” for a while, he started instead tagging some “graphic design.” So, when he goes to find info about color theory in ten years, if he doesn’t remember he used to call them all “web design,” he’ll miss them. The tools don’t handle this well, he says.

Now Jackson gives his official talk. He says content is very personal. When content creators tagged their own material at lulu.com (where he works) and found out that others could see those tags, they were livid. Then they calmed down and saw they could connect their content with others. Is it a folksonomy if the taggers are the content creators? How do you avoid spamming?

Thomas: Creator’s tagging doesn’t fit within folksonomy, but it can be a type of seeding.

I say that if a site made the author’s tags visible next to the readers’ tags, it’d stimulate anti-author tags.

Jung Sun Oh says in her talk that we don’t know whether people tag based on their own mental models or based on the terms in the source they’re tagging.

Terrell Russell says he’d like to help people figure out what they know by seeing one another’s tags. If you make the tags and concepts visible and put them in the middle the room at all times, you’ll begin to converge. Thomas says Cameron Marlowe at Yahoo has built something like this. He says that in one instance, people were removing tags about themselves. Nicole Ellison says that in some organizations, you don’t want to be tagged a particular way because it might drive people toward you. Zeynep Tufecki says that people care a lot about their identity; she’s reminded of research about identity in prisons and other places where you don’t have control over that. Jackson says that on the other hand, you can build social capital that way. Amanda Lenhart points to the identity brouhaha at FaceBook as an example of the dangers. Cliffe Lampe suggests pairing it with a reputation system. There’s discussion of whether such a system would result in only positive assessments. Lilly worries about mistakes staying with your forever; Terrell says he’s working on tag decay. Fred Stutzman says this is a social attribution system, but tagging boils things down too much so it’ll be harder to discover what we don’t know about a person. Terrell says that he’s aiming at skills areas. Laura Sheble says it might be helpful to have a way to respond. Also, it’ll be interesting to look at the edge cases, she says. [Tags: unc taxonomy folksonomy everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Thomas “Father of Folksonomy” Vander Wal is giving a talk at the Univ. of North Carolina symposium on social software. (I gave the opening 15 min talk, as per my previous post.) [As always, I’m paraphrasing, typing quickly, missing stuff, getting things wrong…]

He defines tagging and then quotes Rashmi Sinha: “The beauty of tagging is that it taps into an existing cognitive process without adding much cognitive cost.”

Thomas thinks the Wikipedia article on folksonomy is now much better than it was. [I haven’t seen it, but that means I’ll probably disaree with it.] He defines it as the result of personal free tagging of pages and objects for one’s own retrieval, usually done in a social environment.

The value of folksonomy is “derived from people using their own vocabulary that adds some explicit meaning, which may come from inferred understanding of the information or object.” He says people aren’t caregorizing so much as “placing hooks” so they can re-find stuff.

He explains the folksonomy triad: Object, metadata and identity. (Flickr tagging doesn’t allow identity, he says.) Between object and identity and interest. Between identity and metadata is vocabulary. Between metadata and object is definition. From identity can come community. Between community and identity is definition. Between community and metadata is terminology. Between community and culture is object. [Here’s a pdf that has many of Thomas’ slides in it, including this diagram.]

He stresses the importance of folksonomies and taxonomies working together, the folksonomy recognizing gaps in the taxonomy. There are business tensions, though, around who controls the naming, the known value of building taxonomies versus the unknown value of folksonomies, and consistency vs. emergence.

He says research shows 0.5% of Net users tag things. People tag because their own use and value comes first, it adds perspective (missing metadata, emergent vocabulary, personal descriptors), refindability (aggregation of info, task-based aggregation), and because it states interest. “Every tag is sacred,” he says, perhaps purposefully echoing Monty Python’s Every Sperm Is Sacred.” He warns us against the impulse to “clean up” a folksonomy.

Q: Is anyone tagging with images?
Thomas: Platial.

Q: Any research into the efficiacy of short descriptions vs. tags? Tags vs. narratives. And few tags are verbs…
A: Perhaps it’s driven by how people search, and they search mainly for nouns.

A: Right now, we only have text boxes. When we have transcription, people will talk narratives. [Good point. When writing, tagging is cognitively easy. When speaking, talking in tags takes focus. It’s easier to spew.]

Q: How about spam?
Thomas: Spamming is hard when you have identity.

Q: Who controls? At K-fed.com, they’ll probably strip out the “should be working at Wendy’s” tags and Slashdot strips out the “gay” tag because it’s applied to every article.
A: “Every tag is sacred” is an ideal, but it helps if you have identity.

Q: Tagging for retrieval is difficult since you can’t know how you’re going to want to search for something.

[Tags: unc thomas_vander_wal folksonomy taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Thomas Vander Wal at the UNC social software symposium I’m at just pointed to the way people at Amazon have tagged Kevin Federline. Pretty funny.

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy thomas_vander_wal kevin_federline k-fed amazon]

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In about an hour, I am giving an informal, 20-minute opening talk at the University of North Carolina’s social software conference. I share the floor with Thomas Vander Wal (his blog), the information architect who coined the term “folksonomy,” and someone who knows far more about the topic than I do. So, I’m going to stay as general and meaningless as I can. Here’s what I’m thinking of saying:

Why do we care about folksonomies? They’re easy to minimize as either (a) Just another tool in the kit, and/or (b) A phenomenon that’s been around for a while (e.g., eBay users’ preference for “laptop” over “notebook,” or language itself). But they’re genuinely exciting. Why?

Yes, they’re useful. I don’t want to downplay that, but the interest is out of proportion to their utility.

I think folksonomies have excited us because of what they say. They are symbols. But of what?

First, we’ve embraced folksonomies so fervently also because they stick it to The Man. We don’t need no stinkin’ experts to organize ideas and information! There is, of course, inefficiency built into expert-based taxonomies because they have to choose one way of ordering, and that one way is necessarily infested with personal, class, and cultural biases. As Clay Shirky says, “Metadata is worldview.” But beyond the inefficiency, simpy having someone else have the authority to say “It shall be filed thus” is a statement of political authority. Even when the experts do a good job—as they usually do, because they’re experts—it is still an implicit statement that someone else’s way of thinking is better than yours.

In the face of this, folksonomy says not just that we each have our own way, but that something like ours emerges from it. Folksonomies are proof of the power of emergence. Emergence is a fascinating phenomenon because it explains complexity through intrinsic simplicity. E.g., termites build complex towers by following rules so simple that they fit in a termite’s brain. But there is also a political side to our interest in emergence, beyond its explanatory power. Emergence is hope. It says (or we take it as saying) that left to ourselves, without extrinsic structuring or regulation or governance, we will be magnificent. This is beyond the hope implicit in democracy, that says a group will be able to live together if all are given equal power. We won’t just live together, but something far beyond the capabilities of any of us will emerge. Simply by being together, cathedrals will emerge.

Folksonomies also embrace excess. Publishing and broadcasting by their nature require us to trim the fat from our world. That’s how those systems survive—a publisher that published everything would go out of business on day one. Folksonomies, on the other hand, promise us that we will manage even if we include everything. In fact, folksonomies do better when there are massive numbers of tags. (They also are most useful when they remain diverse. A folksonomy that creates absolute momentum around a single tag, so that over time everyone uses only that tag, is not just non-optimal, it’s dangerous…a “tyranny of the majority.”)

Finally, in embracing tagging and folksonomies we’re rejecting the essentialism our Western tradition began with. Essentialism says that of all the ways of understanding a thing, one is its real way. This makes intuitive sense to us, because we recognize that using a hammer as a doorstop is an oddball use of a hammer; it remains first and foremost something we use for hammering. But essentialism is expensive to maintain. Its metaphysics are convoluted and unbelievable. It inhibits thought. It reflects cultural hegemony. It is unenforceable. And it alienates meaning, putting it into the world rather than among us where it belongs. Folksonomy returns meaning to us, but makes it larger than any one of us. We shouldn’t need folksonomy to do this; language itself should be proof enough. But essentialism has been such a powerful force that we do need folksonomy to kick it in its teeth one more time.

Essentialism includes not just the essences but also their arrangement, their ordering. Folksonomy makes that, too, ours…although, as anything more than a reflection of how we’ve joined and disjoined meaning, it makes me nervous. Beyond the tyranny of the majority, folksonomizing meaning removes the poetry of essentialism, replacing it with statistical averaging.

But folksonomy is not, will not, and should not be our only way of ordering the world. And that’s part of folksonomy’s symbolism as well. Or at least I hope so.

I wish I hadn’d written this post in such a hurry :( [Tags: folksonomy tagging taxonomy philosophy everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Glyn at the Open Rights Group blog posts about the Gowers Review‘s government-commissioned report on what to do about “intellectual property.” (ORG’s press release on the report is here. And—disclosure—I am an ORG’s advisory board, although I’ve missed every phone call.) Apparently, the report is surprisingly not horrible, and is in some ways, pretty good.

It does not recommend extending copyright any further for audio recordings. Yay! Of course, the Brits already give them 50 years of protection, which IMO is way too long—but is far better than the US’s ridiculous giving corpses copyright control for 70 years. And, the Gowers report actually adds exemptions for transformative and derivative works, AKA mash-ups. It even decriminalizes copying from CDs to your MP3 player. And it sings along with Larry Lessig about the cultural tragedy of keeping “orphaned” works—out of print works whose copyright owner cannot be found—protected by copyright. (What’s the opposite of a victimless crime? A beneficiary-free restriction?)

It also suggests the highly sensible idea of requiring DRM’ed works to be labeled as such so the market can decide just how much it’s willing to be bullied.

But, Glyn points out that the report also recommends stricter enforcement of the laws protecting “IP” without distinguishing between commercial pirates manufacturing illegal CDs and individual teenagers sharing music with friends for free.

Overall, the Gowers Report will infuriate the music labels because it considers what’s best for citizens, customers and creators. A step in the right direction the US would do well to emulate. [Tags: gowers copyright drm music open_rights_group lessig]

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Edgar Bronfman, head of the fourth largest music company, acknowledged in an interview that his kids have downloaded music without paying. He declined to say how he dealt with them. As a commenter (iburl) puts it:

So the concequences for 14 year old Susie Q. Public downloading some stupid song that she could have legally taped off of the radio are that her parents and her a put through a protracted form of legal extortion, resulting in the depletion of their family’s life savings and plunged into debt, perhaps permanently effecting the child’s future education. The concequences for this guy… he has to give a stern lecture. Now we know why everyone loves record company weasels!

Here’s a basic moral test: If you think a punishment is unfair if applied to you or your kids, then it’s unfair if applied to someone else under the same circumstances. That goes for Bronfman, for drug-addicted right-wing radio hosts, and for certain sitting presidents who favor locking up coke users for ungodly lengths of time. [Tags: music justice bronfman bush hypocrites smug_bastards]

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Nicole Simon has posted a podcast interview with me. It’s one in a series of podcasts in anticipation of the Paris blogging conference I’m going to next week (lucky me!). [Tags: podcasts nicole_simon le_web paris ]

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David Isenberg has an excellent post on the implication (based, alas, on a misuse of something I’d blogged) that because we may not know exactly and precisely how Net neutrality will be applied in every instance, we therefore do not know what Net neutrality is. To use David’s implied analogy, we don’t know in every instance ahead of time whether a killing was a murder, we’re quite clear about what murder means. [Tags: net_neutrality david_isenberg wikipedia ]

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People who have difficulty reading—because they’re blind or dyslexic, or they access large sites using small mobile devices—have difficulty using the Internet. ReadSpeaker has been providing a hosted service to European sites so that users can click on a button and have a Web page (or a portion of it) read out loud. I met with the ReadSpeaker team today.

ReadSpeaker uses other folks’ text-to-speech renderers, running it on their servers. Today they work in 12 languages (the European ones, plus Japanese and Brazilian Portuguese), and have 600 customers. Some are sites aiming at providing accessibility (including the British Museum and Vodaphone) and some are Big Content companies (Herald Tribune, Handelsblatt) that have commercial reasons for making their text more widely read. The accessibility sites pay a fee to ReadSpeaker (about €5000/year) while the content sites use an advertising model. For sites they render, ReadSpeaker can also render the text and layout to meet accessibility guidelines. (The lead developer is blind, by the way.) ReadSpeaker claims to have 25M users per year. Now they want to make inroads in the US, and are reaching out to the blogosphere.

For blogs, they will have two offerings, perhaps later this month. One is a small aggregator that lets you add three feeds of your choice, for free. You can play them, add them to iTunes, or retrieve them on a mobile browser through a compact html page they generate. Second, you can provide your readers with a link that takes them to a ReadSpeaker page that links to the spoken version of your posts, or subscribes them to a podcast version of your feed, generated automatically. ReadSpeaker is offering this for free. At some point, they may offer an advanced version that comes with advertising.

Users can submit suggestions for correcting pronunciations, which is a nice feature.

You can subscribe to the audible version of the Joho RSS feed here or listen to posts here. The audo rendering seems good and it’s a service some people may want or need. So, why wouldn’t I—and you—offer it on our blogs? [Tags: readspeak accessibility]

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