The Guardian has a story by Mark Honigsbaum about an attempt to identify gay-related items:

Backed by the museums documentation watchdog, MDA, the group Proud Heritage this week began sending out a two-page survey requesting that institutions throughout the country list the gay and lesbian documents and artefacts in their collections. “For the first time ever, we are asking museums, libraries and archives throughout Britain to revisit their holdings and reveal what they have that is queer,” said Proud Heritage’s director Jack Gilbert. “At the moment these are not classified correctly, or held completely out of context and never see the light of day.”

…

Proud Heritage has also been working closely with local authorities. At the Lllangolen Museum in Denbighshire, north Wales, for instance, there is an exhibit commemorating the lives of Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby. Known locally as the Ladies of Llangollen, they lived together in a small cottage from 1819 until their deaths in 1829 and 1831, and were renowned for wearing dark riding habits, an eccentric choice of dress for the time.

“They would never have used the word lesbian to describe their relationship but there is no question that they lived together and shared the same bed,” said Mr Gilbert. “We think there may well be similar examples in other archives, but because people didn’t use words like lesbian and gay 200 years ago archivists have either overlooked it or simply don’t realise it’s there.”

Great example of why authors/creators/publishers are not the best or final taggers of their own stuff. (Thanks to Phil Edwards for the link.) [Tags: taxonomy tagging EverythingIsMiscellaneous gay museums]

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The fact that the most visited site on the Net has bought the premier tagging site should confirm that tagging is going mainstream.

Yahoo has profoundly not screwed up Flickr, so I have confidence that del.icio.us users are not going to feel betrayed or de-featured by Yahoo.

Most important, Yahoo is now in a position to become a tag broker, adding value to the act of tagging, thus driving more tagging, thus increasing the Web’s memetic value. With widespread tagging, the Web means more.

Congratulations to Joshua Schachter and the rest of the Delicious folks. [Tags: tagging yahoo delicious]

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“Category imperialism” is the title of a new posting by Julian Bond that raises essential questions.

I don’t know the answers to those questions, but I’d point out that category imperialism results not just from decisions made by powerful sites about what categories/fields to track and which values to respect. It can also happen when folksonomies succeed in creating a power law distribution of a term: E.g., 95% of people at eBay who are selling laptops refer to them as “notebooks.” (Note: I made up that fact.) There’s some hope that computers can automatically translate local/personal taxonomies into the standardized terms, but Julian is pointing a truly tough issue: The long tail can be a powerful force for conformity.

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On November 30 I’m giving a talk at Oxford on tagging. (Woohoo! Oxford!) It’ll be webcast. Unfortunately, for you blighters across the pond, it starts at 10:00AM London time, which means it’s 4 or 5 in the morning in Boston…right in time for you to tune in when you get back from sculling on the Charles. How convenient. [Tags: tagging taxonomy]

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From a press release:

BroadbandSports.com, the world’s first-ever, video-only sports portal, was launched today by the founder of Webby Award winning sports site, MountainZone.com and former ESPN.com and Amazon.com staff.

The destination sports website allows viewers to watch professional and user-generated sports videos and empowers them with ways to “tag”, search, find, store and replay their favorite video any time, anywhere.

Haven’t tried it — I did a round trip to NYC today to spend the day talking with a client about knowledge management, and I’m beat — but sounds interesting. [Tags: taxonomy EverythingIsMiscellaneous folksonomy tagging]

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You can read here a brief article of mine, in Forrester Magazine, on how the 1930s ideas of Ranganathan, the Indian library genius, inspired faceted classification that’s saving IBM $500M a year. [Tags: taxonomy libraries ranganathan FacetedClassification EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

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Here are two points that I had to remove from my piece in the Sunday Boston Globe due to space constraints. People have sent me email about both.

First, books are way complex. What is Hamlet? Any book of the play? The Signet edition? A reprint of the Signet edition? The Signet edition with a new preface? With errata corrected? The Signet large print edition? The German translation? The original manuscript? Hamlet in the one-volume Collected Works? This matters because when you’re looking for a copy of Hamlet, you’re acting as if that were unambiguous when in fact there are various forms of the book that will or will not satisfy you. This is the type of complexity that drives people to create ontologies. Short of that, xISBN tries to cluster books in reasonable ways. . And there’s a standard (I can’t lay my hands on it now — FRBR? — I’m slightly on the road) that lays out the various levels of abstraction.

Second, the original version of my article made the case — way too quickly — that contents are now metadata: E.g., you look up a phrase at Google Print to find out the name of the book. In fact, the only difference between metadata and data now seems to be that data is what you’re looking for and metadata is what you use to find it. (I’ve written about this before.) [Tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous metadata taxonomy ontology]

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This short piece in the Boston Globe Ideas section started out as an article about the Dewey Decimal system in the digital age, with Google Print as a hook. But the hook ate the fish. [Tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous google GooglePrint metadata taxonomy]

Glenn Fleishman has a fascinating post about this very issue today. What a coincidence!

The question “What is a book?” just gets harder and harder the more you look at it. I’d interviewed a bunch of folks on this topic for the Globe piece, but it all got cut as my allotted length went from 1200 words to 750 due to reshuffling of ads or some such thing. (A good place to start: FRBR – Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records.)

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I’m keynoting a teacher’s conference in Texas. It’s being held in Irving, outside of Dallas, at the Academy of Irving, the local technology-focused public high school. It’s open and light. (My own high school, progressive though it was, instilled in me a lifelong fear of cinderblock.) And there’s wifi! My host told me on the drive from the hotel that it’s primarily a poor district, but this school does not feel that way. Good priorities.

The school library is modest but inviting. The books are shelved according to Dewey but the online catalog — there is no paper one — from The Library Corp doesn’t care about that. It seems mainly search-based, with suggestions of books and categories returned. While the Dewey hierarchy is offensive to modern sensibilities (and any stable hierarchy is going to be offensive to some because we just don’t agree on how knowledge is nested), shelved books exhibit no hierarchy, just a cloud of related topics. Now that the metadata is digital, the utility of Dewey’s shelving need not be marred by the provincialism of Dewey’s classification. [Tags: taxonomy DeweyDecimal EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

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I’m at a small IBM press event, “The Future of Social Networks” held in the IBM office in Cambridge. They’re talking about 1) Social Nets Analytics, a “solution” [yech, I hate that term — What product isn’t a solution? Can-opener= Your sealed can solution. Plunger = Your crap won’t go down solution] that tracks and analyzes what’s being said about you on in blogs, feeds, articles…; 2) Appliki, an “application wiki” [= JotSpot competitor, = Why aren’t we using Notes for this?]; 3) Jamalyzer, productizing what IBM uses in its “jams,” multi-day cross-company conversations; 4) dogear social bookmarking service [= del.icio.us + “authentication,” i.e. The Folksonomy Torquer]; 5) Fringe, a productiziation of IBM’s internal employee phonebook [ = Friendster without the condoms]; Web Activity Management, what seems to be a portal for tracking all your business activities and communications [ = Big Blue Brother]; 6) Blog and Wiki Central, IBM’s internal blog aggregator. (I’m on a panel on social software at the end.) [Non-disclosure: I’m not getting paid for this and have no financial relationship with IBM.]

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, VP of Technical Strategy and Innovation leads off. He says that Web 1.0 was originally made up of content generated by institutions. [This is my biggest issued with the Web 2.0 meme overall32
: It’s solidifying the totally false idea that until Web 2.0, users weren’t on the Web. In fact, what drove the Web from the first day was the ability of users to speak and connect.] We’re now seeing the rise of collaborative knowledge, he says. KM was “incredibly boring.” Now it’s arising organically, he says.

Irving moderates a panel including Marc Andrews (strategy, content integration, search), Mike Rhodin (GM workplace, portal and collaboration) and Irene Greif (IBM fellow, collaborative user experience).

Mike recommends blogs as a way for leaders to get their messages out. [Oh, yes, I really want to absorb yet more messages from leaders.] He also recommends the Fringe demo as a way of pulling together info spread across directories. Also, real time info sharing has started to shift organizational norms; he hypes wikis as a “new publishing paradigm,” a real-time paradigm. You could open one up to employees, customers, etc. “We’re flipping the model.”

Irene: Why do some things take off and others don’t? Why do people contribute to open source? How does email change social networks? Wikis? Blogs? These are the sorts of questions her group addresses.

Marc: “Collaborative environments like blogs…accelerate the impact of public opinion on businesses.” This makes it imperative that businesses monitor the blogosphere.

Mike: At IBM, you can save an answer on a wiki into the knowledge base.

Q Judith Hurwitz: There’s a dark side. Someone could create a rich environment of misinformation.

Marc: That’s why it’s so important to monitor that.

Mike: We’ve always had this problem. It comes with every medium.

Q (eWeek): How do you balance openness with the desire to control info? E.g., Apple took down some comments reporting on the iPod Nano’s friability.

Irving: It depends. In IBM we figure we have good people around the world and we trust them to do the right thing.

Amy Wohl: At IBM there are 20,000 internal blogs but only a few hundred external bloggers. Looking at the flow of what’s being communicated internally is just as important as looking at what’s being said externally

Mike: Yup.

Next, they go through some demos

Irene: It’s all Web 2.0 stuff. [Ok, the way Web 2.0 is generally being taken up (not just by IBM) is really starting to annoy me. Blogs started in 1999. That’s 6 years ago. And even without blogs, what drove people to the Web were not institutional sites but the ability to talk. The web 2.0 meme makes sense to companies that ignored our voices for the Web’s first ten years.]

Public Image Monitoring. Omnifind-based Public Image Monitoring. Analyzes content from articles, feeds, blogs, surveys, etc. Identifies hot topics and “vocal sources.” Understands the tone and sentiment of the feedback. Monitors what’s being said about competitors and suppliers.

Demo: What are people saying about Honda and Toyota. Looked the thousand most recent blogs that mention them. What other makes and models are they talking about? What issues are arising? Are things stated as facts or opinions? The software graphs the percentage of positive mentions, which topics, etc. Drill into, say, “fuel economy,” and it shows the posts. Or check on specific models and it finds there are lots of negative comments about the hybrid Civic’s fuel economy.

Q: Does it rank blogs?

Marc: This is only the first step. We have a component that determines who is the most vocal. Not yet who is the most influential.

Application Wikis. Extensions to wikis that lets people “easily link together applications and services that are on the Web.” David Sink and Joel Farrell show the QEDWiki demo. They show a table of contacts and then turn it into a database. They do a “mash up” with Google Maps and weather data. Right now, it requires on-screen programming, but they assure us it’ll be much more user-friendly when it ships. [It’s a JotSpot competitor. (Non-disclosure: I’m on SocialText‘s board of advisors.)] It’s php-extensible. It uses AJAX. [Ajax + Google Maps: Your proof that it’s a certified Web 2.0 brand.]

Jamalyzer. IBM holds 72-hour company-wide conversations periodically. In one there were about 53,000 participants. Jamalyzer analyzes the data and shows various clusters of info. It uses their “eClassifier” technology. “The social network is embedded in this implicitly.”

dogear. Del.icio.us for inside the firewall. It’s a research prototype now available throughout IBM. David Millen demos it and shows that the suggested autocompletions for tags include the number of other people using that tag, a way of quickly driving a folksonomy [although it also encourages the downside of folksonomies: conformity]. Within IBM, there are almost 17,000 bookmarks (generated in 2-3 months), with only 10% of them private. The tags retain an association with the person who made them. It shows people who have the same tags as you, deriving a social network from a semantic one. You can import bookmarks from del.icio.us. There are group bookmarks as well, something del.icio.us is working on adding. At IBM someone did a Firefox extension so that searches in the Firefox search box first do a query against dogear bookmarks and then does the search on your choice of engines. As a result, you get the high-quality tag-based results first. [I’d like that plugin: Show me del.icio.us tags and then Google results.] [If del.icio.us were interested in the enterprise market, it should be worried about this not-yet-product.] [Note: AT IBM’s request, I have corrected “DogEar” to “dogear.”]

David also talks about Fringe, a directory crawler that looks for relationships among people. It incorporates DogEar tags.

Unified Activity Management. Dan Gruen of IBM Research talks about “activity-centered collaboration.” It’s a type of project collaboration system, similar to eRoom and Open Text. [Disclosure: I’ve consulted for both those companies and was a VP at the latter. In fact, my kids are going to college on Open Text money.] It has a set of steps for the project on the left. In the main area, it has an “activity thread” that associates documents, emails etc., with the various steps. Oooh factor: Drag and drop steps from previous projects. Beneath it is a Semantic Web idea: An ontology of task semantics expressed in RDF, with REST APIs. [Notes shows up as an example of something you can link into. And that’s it for Notes.])

The panel is pure Q&A. I’m living blogging it, which is slightly embarassing. On it are the estimable Bill Ives, Steve Sparkes (a CIO from Morgan Stanley), and me.

Steve from Morgan Stanley is a happy user. He says collaboration used to rely on the informal network, mutliple phone calls, etc. An expertise search effort failed: The data got stale and it was extra work. They’re having more luck mining people’s activities. He’s excited about what he’s seen today.

Q (Judith Hurwitz): This sounds like the evolution of the portal. How does this impact the SMB market, e.g., firms that collaborate with a Toyota or a Wal-Mart?

Bill: Positively.,

Q (Amy Wohl): Do companies use blogs as a substitute or an addition?

Bill: Both.

Me: Email replaced memos and meetings, to some extent. Wikis will replace reports to some extent. Blogs will replace home pages. (Yes, that was an exaggeration.)

Q: How do blogs fit with Sarbanes-Oxley?

Stephen: Complementary. Social networking analysis helps us meet those obligations.

Bill: “Unless you’re trying to hide something, it makes it easier.”

Q: If conversations are occurring in email, blogs, wikis, etc., doesn’t this have a chlling effect because everyone can see them?

Bill: It has the opposite effect. Because people know it’s public, they try even harder.

Stephen: We have private spaces for senior groups. You need to be able to produce sufficiently differentiate pools…

Q: How do we trust blogs?

Me: It’s a conversation. We figure it out. [I gave a longer answer. Damn live-blogging.]

Amy Wohl: You have to look at blogs by category because they’re very different, e.g., a political commentator, a researcher, etc. The blogosphere is good at sorting out trust issues.

Bill: There are many little blogospheres. With any of those, in my experience, there are usually about two dozen top ones. It’s pretty easy to filter out the interlopers and the pretenders. It’s not like you’re filtering millions. [Tags: delicious ibm SocialSoftware]

[The next day:] As commenters have pointed out, this post reads nastily. I’ve posted a comment apologizing and clarifying. What I meant to be snarky teasing may come across as relentless criticism. The morning was actually quite interesting, several of the products/technologies look promising, and it was exciting to hear IBM promoting the virtues of decentralized social software. (I’ve modified a phrase about Web 2.0 to make it clear that IBM’s use of the phrase is a common use; my testiness about it is not directed at IBM.)

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