I’m listening to Love, the Beatles mashup by George Martin and his son.

Yes, it’s part stunt. The Beatles left such a rich selection of song styles and pieces that you can create a version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” without a dominant guitar. But the CD is also an act of love that makes that song—which I always found slightly embarrassingly George-ish—more lovely than the original. The Martins often reveal an essence of melody, harmony, voice, meaning or mood. (Keep in mind that I am a sentimental Beatles fool. They were our music in a way that my children have yet to find for themselves.)

The first track is a version of “Because” rendered less sentimental by highlighting the beautiful vocal work. The second track, “Get Back,” is fun. But the third track, “Glass Onion” overwhelmed me. It pulls together many pieces, most recognizable if not actually familiar. Each of the parts is so resonant that it sank me into the feelings those songs had engendered. No, not feelings. Meanings. What the songs meant to me.

This is the part of what I’ve been calling the “miscellaneous” that that word doesn’t capture. Categorization puts like next to like. The miscellaneous category consists of that which does not share likenesses beyond their shared domain—the kitchen’s miscellaneous drawer contains implements that have nothing in common beyond the fact that they all belong in a kitchen. But the digital miscellany we’re building for ourselves is an over-abundance of likenesses, across every domain. The likenesses are drawn by every link we create, each made of intention and meaning. In some ways, it is the opposite of the miscellany. It is the surfeit of connection, a potential unlike anything we’ve had before short of language itself. [Tags: beatles taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Public Library of Science has gone beta with PLos ONE, a peer-reviewed journal that publishes everything that passes the review, not just what it considers to be important. So, if it’s good science about a nit, it’ll find a home at PLoS ONE.

And at that home, readers can discuss and annotate the articles. They can also read them and reuse for free since they’re all published under a Creative Commons Attribution License. It does, however, cost a scientist (or her institution) $1,250 to be published by PLoS ONE. This is, alas, an improvement over what traditional journals charge scientists. PLoS ONE will waive the fee for authors who don’t have the funds.

Fees aside, if you were designing a society, wouldn’t you want scientific research to be handled this way? If it’s good science, make it available! (And if it’s not clear if it’s good science, make it available anyway, but that’s not PLoS ONE’s niche in the knowledge economy.)

(Note on the beta: The site could use tagging. And more feeds.) [Tags: plos plos_one open_science science everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy]

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Discover magazine runs two letters this month that bring up two more problems with the International Astronomical Union’s criteria for planets. Jerry Svoboda points out that because Neptune’s orbit is crossed by Pluto, Neptune fails to “clear its zone,” thus failing one criterion for planethood. Brett Bochner argues (in a reductio ad absurdum sort of way) that Jupiter is 300 times larger than the Earth and is made almost entirely of gas, and thus shouldn’t be lumped with the Earth.

Fortunately, I have the solution.

Everyone knows the IAU’s tortured criteria were designed to give us back as many of the nine planets as possible. Even so, the IAU failed. At best we got eight planets and one dwarf. So, let’s skip all the weird distinctions and just declare the Solar System a constellation. After all, no one says that some other star really “deserves” to be part of Ursa Major even if it means the bear now becomes a unicorn. Nope, a constellation is what we say it is, and the same is now true for the nine planets of the Solar System.

Welcome back, Pluto!

[Tags: taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous IAU planets pluto solar_system astronomy taxonomy]

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Slashdot has a thread about a debate over whether Internet abuse counts as a true addiction. (Yet another taxonomic question!) Here’s what I posted in response. Since it was rated 1 (out of 5), you’re not going to stumble across it unless you have your filter set to “Masochist.”

Thank God!

I myself have been showing disturbing signs of being compulsively human. I’ve noticed that I feel an urge I simply cannot control to be social. This really began to scare me when I tried not to talk and found that after a mere seven hours – seven hours! — I said, “Howya doin’?” to the bagger at the supermarket. I didn’t want to. It just slipped out. I couldn’t control myself. Ever since, I’ve given in to my urge – yes, I know, I’m sick – answering the phone when it rings, responding not only to questions but to mere pleasantries, and even initiating conversations when they weren’t strictly required.

It’s a nightmare. And it gets worse.

it’s not just that when I’m with others, I – ugh! – participate in destructive social rituals like caring what people are saying. Even when I’m alone, kind thoughts about other people invade my consciousness. I feel an impulse to wonder what they’re thinking and what matters to them. I try to focus on computing pi or to remember the 1955 Dodgers starting lineup, but I just can’t shut out those images and feelings.

Sometimes – and I’m so ashamed to admit this – I use the Internet to sate these shameful urges.

Admitting all this in public is, I can only hope, the first step towards healing. [Tags: internet addiction humor everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy ]

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The U of North Carolina social software symposium has a wiki with session notes and more… [Tags: unc social_software ]

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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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On Monday, I’m trying out a talk I’ll be giving at the U of North Carolina a few days later. The talk is called, for now, in a doomed attempt to be slightly light-hearted about it, “Being and Tags. Here are the five sections (not counting the zero-based prologue):

0. Three orders of order
1. Tiny tags
2. Are taxonomies real?
3. Can tags be wrong?
4. The miscellany beneath
5. Tagging meaning

The section that particularly worries me is #2—Perhaps you’ve heard that there is no one true taxonomy?— mainly because I think it argues against a position no one really holds. But I can’t tell any more.

I’m also worried about the presentation style. I’m trying to be more precise than usual, so I’ve written out a talk, tightly integrated with Powerpoint—yes, Powerpoint, dammit!—with tons of animations. While I carefully prepare presentations, I never read them from a script. Except for this one.

The whole thing is headed for disaster.

Although the Monday night talk started out as one in my Web of Ideas discussion series, it’s been assimilated into the Harvard-Yale Cyber Scholars series. So, at 6pm you can here Yale’s Shyam Balganesh talking about “Social Costs of Property Rights in Broadcast.” I’m on at 7pm. We’re serving Indian food. It’s open to everyone. [map] [Tags: tags taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous berkman philosophy aristotle]

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