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November 1, 2005
Excellent interview with Peter Morville over at Tag! You’re It! Peter is an information architect and the author of a new book I really really like, Ambient Findability. [Tags: PeterMorville tagging EverythingIsMiscellaneous taxonomy]
October 26, 2005
Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us spoke twice at the Berkman Center yesterday. I blogged the first session, but I was moderating the second so I couldn’t. Both sessions I thought were excellent: Joshua is a low signal-to-noise communicator, he’s working on important issues, and I find his point of view unpredictable (which is a good thing).
Here’s some of what I thought was especially interesting. (Warning: Miscellaneous list ahead:)
Delicious is adding social networking. You’ll be able to designate people as members of your “network” so you can keep up with what they’re tagging and you’ll be able to create groups within which bookmarks can be kept private. Eventually, Delicious may disambiguate tags in part by weighing your groups’/network’s use of them more heavily. In any case, the addition of social networking will create yet more unintended consequences…something to look forward to.
Delicious is not going to go after the enterprise market. Instead, eventually Joshua will make an open source version available. I was surprised by this since I’ve been talking about tagging with a fair number of large companies who are excited about it and would buy a version of Delicious for internal use. Joshua thinks he couldn’t charge enough. I think they’d pay substantial sums for it.
Joshua’s elevator pitch says that Delicious is about remembering stuff. I continue to think its success is due to its social nature. The disagreement is one of emphasis only. But if I were his marketing vp, I’d tell him to market the tagstreams, not the bookmarks or the tags. Of course, I have no data supporting my view, but I was never that sort of marketing vp (i.e., reality-based).
The rate of tag spam seems incredibly low: A couple of incidents a week. (Tag spam means someone tags a page with hundreds or thousands of tags so that people will come to it.) In part, said Joshua, that’s because tag spam brings you no google juice.
He is not using stemming software that recognizes “blog,” “blogging” and “blogs” all have the same stem in part because there is meaning to the variants and in part because he hasn’t found any that’s good enough.
A little thing: I learned last night that if you use the tag “for:someone,” that bookmark is sent to the Delicious user with the name “someone.”
By the way, the evening session will be available as a podcast sometime soon. I’ll let you know. [Tags: delicious JoshuaSchachter berkman tagging]
Beth Kanter did an excellent job live-blogging the evening discussion. Thanks, Beth!
October 25, 2005
[I wrote this before Joshua’s double talks at Berkman today – I thought both were excellent – and came home to discover I never posted it. So here it is, in non-reverse-chronoogical order.]
In preparation for Joshua Schachter’s appearances at the Berkman Center (Plug: at 6pm, he’s the guest at a “Web of Ideas” discussion to which you’re invited) I checked his own page at del.icio.us. He has his bookmarks grouped into headings that tell you a lot about him. So does his tagcloud. Same for the rest of us. And, I’m guessing, the subheadings do not necessarily match what we would have listed on a profile page under “interests.” For example, Joshua has headings for ephemera, food, and time. As we create tags, discovering the subheadings we need may tell us something we did not know before about our interests, just as my college buddy Hank in his junior year looked over the courses he had taken and said, “Gee, I guess I’m interested in China.”
That del.icio.us tags and subheads are public of course influences which ones we list. For example, I didn’t want to use del.icio.us to track pages I was visiting when researching large screen TVs because, well, I’m not proud that I was researching large screen TVs. The rest of you may not be as small-minded and vain as I am, of course. [Tags: tagging JoshuaSchachter berkman]
October 24, 2005
Ah, flickr! How much do we love thee! [Thanks to Ben Hyde for the link.] [Tags: metadata flickr EverythingIsMiscellaneous]
October 15, 2005
Del.icio.us‘s own Joshua Schachter is going to give a lunchtime talk at the Berkman Center on October 25, and that evening he’ll be my guest at a “Web of Ideas” open discussion. Both events are open to the public, although the lunchtime one requires an RSVP; check the Berkman page for details as they become available. [Tags: tagging JoshuaSchachter berkman]
September 21, 2005
NPR’s “All Things Considered” last night ran a three minute commentary of mine on tagging. You can hear it here, thanks to Michael Shook. [Later: Here’s NPR’s own version.]
Here’s a near-transcript:
Google is smart, but here’s a tough problem for it. Let’s say you type in “africa,” “agriculture” and “grains” because that’s what you’re researching. You’ll get lots of results, but you may miss pages about “couscous” because Google is searching for the word “grain” and doesn’t know that that’s what couscous is made of. Google knows the words on the pages, but doesn’t know what the pages are about. That’s much harder for computers because what something is about really depends on what you’re looking for. That same page on couscous that to you is about economics could be about healthy eating to me or about words that repeat syllables to someone else. And that’s the problem with all attempts by experts and authorities to come up with neat organizations of knowledge: What something is about depends on whose looking.
Now a new tool is emerging on the Internet that helps us find things based on what we think they’re about. It’s called tagging, and without intending to, it’s shaking up our ideas about how knowledge is organized.
For example, take a look at the site that kicked off the new wave of tagging, It’s called Delicious and its web address is http://del.icio.us. Let’s say you come across the Moroccan couscous web page and you want to remember it. So you upload its Web address to your free page at delicious that lists all the pages you’ve saved. Then delicious asks you to enter a word or two as tags so you can find the Moroccan page later. You might tag it with Morocco, recipe, couscous, and main course, and then later you can see all the pages you’ve tagged with any of those words.
That’s a handy way to organize a large list of pages, but tagging at delicious really took off because it’s a social activity: Everyone can see all the pages anyone has tagged with say, Morocco or main course or agriculture. This is a great research tool because just by checking the tag “agriculture” now and then, you’ll see every page everyone else at delicious has tagged that way. Some of those pages will be irrelevant to you, of course, but many won’t be. It’s like having the world of people who care about a topic tell you everything they’ve found of interest.And unlike at Google, you’ll find the pages that other humans have decided are ABOUT your topic.
That’s the real change in about-ness. Consider another tagging site, Flickr — that’s f-l-i-c-k-r without the e — where you can upload photos you want to share with friends or the world. You might tag the snapshot you took of the guards at Buckingham Palace as “London” and “Buckingham.” But I might come across it and tag it as “Big Funny Hats” because I’m working on a paper about fashion mistakes. You and I don’t have to agree on what your photo is about. This takes classification and about-ness out of the hands of authors and experts. Now it’s up to us readers to decide what something is about.
Not only does this let us organize stuff in ways that make more sense to us, but we no longer have to act as if there’s only one right way of understanding everything, or that authors and other authorities are the best judges of what things are about. And that’s a big lesson. [Tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous taxonomy tags delicious flickr]
September 13, 2005
Peter Morville has started a blog about findability, the topic of his informative and highly readable book, Ambient Findability. [Tags: taxonomy EverythingIsMiscellaneous PeterMorville]
August 4, 2005
I’m reading Philipp Blom’s Enlightening the World about the 18th Century French Encyclopedia put together by Diderot and D’Alembert, an amazing project. The passages from the Encyclopedia highlight one of the things I miss about Wikipedia: Style.
The Encyclopedia entries are frequently witty, lively, highly-styled. Wikipedia’s commitment to a neutral point of view tends to drive style out of the articles so they talk in a matter-of-fact, affectless, voiceless tone of voice. I guess that’s the price we pay for Wikipedia’s approximation of neutrality.
Blom’s book is largely about the Encyclopedia as a political tract into which Diderot smuggled anti-authoritarian messages. For example, its choice of topics put more emphasis on manufacturing and craft techniques than on aristocratic and theological concerns. Wikipedia, on the other hand, surfaces and removes smuggled messages. There’s obviously good reason to do so, but it removes the double edge so conducive to great writing.
Not a complaint. There are lots of places on the Web where you can get all the voice and opinionatedness you want but precious few where you can get what the Wikipedia gives us.
If you want to read some of the Encyclopedia in English, there’s a collaborative translation project underway. And don’t miss Benjamin Heller’s translation of the Map of the System of Human Knowledge. As Blom’s book points out, putting Theology under Science of God, and having it lead to superstition, divination and black magic could not have made the French establishment very happy. (Wikipedia has a good article on the Tree.)
BTW, it’s interesting to see which of the articles have been translated so far: I didn’t see any on manufacturing, but lots on big abstract nouns. [Technorati tags: wikipedia EverythingIsMiscellaneous]
August 2, 2005
Example of the conventionality of scientific classifications: We can’t even agree on what counts as a planet.
According to an editorial in today’s NY Times, Michael Brown, a Caltech astronomer, declined to call the object he found last year a planet and suggested that neither is Pluto. Now he’s found something bigger than Pluto and suggests that we call it and Pluto planets. According to The Times: “There was still no good scientific rationale for the judgment, he admitted, but this was a case where habit — 75 years of calling Pluto a planet—should trump any scientific definition.”
I don’t care except that I like that something we take as so iconic, so definitional as the solar system itself should turn out to be as much a matter of convention as whether we count pool as a game or as a sport. [Thanks to our daughter Leah for the link.] [Technorati tags: taxonomy astronomy]
July 19, 2005
Tom Coates does some analysis to illustrate what he suggests is a cultural difference in how people use tags. Some use tags as folders to house objects, others use them as descriptions of objects. (And, it seems to me, many of us do both.) His example: If you tag an URL as “blogs,” you are collecting blogs into a virtual folder. If you tag an URL “blog,” you are describing it as an example of a blog. In the first case, you’re probably putting blogs aside so you can read them. In the second, you may be researching the blog phenomenon. Tom’s research leads him to conjecture that “the folder metaphor is losing ground and the keyword one is currently assuming dominance.”
I assume this is correlated to blogging for myself and blogging to add to the social tagstream. I tend to folder for myself and to keyword when contributing to a social tagstream
(And now for a really messy example. Since I sometimes write about the blogging phenomenon, my blog site uses a category (= tag) called “blogs.” But because I know that many many many people at del.icio.us use the tag “blogs” as a way of foldering blogs, I use “blogging” when technorati-tagging posts about blogging. Since I use “blogs” as a keyword, I am a counter-example to Tom’s post.)
It’s all very confusing. Fortunately, Tom is a good explainer… [Technorati tags: TomCoates tagging taxonomy EverythingIsMiscellaneous]
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