At the beginning of next week, Technorati will launch a new tag aggregation feature: When you search on a tag, you’ll be shown a list of “related” tags. The relationships are automatically discerned by the software, analyzing the other tags used by people tagging the same set of pages and photos. Dave Sifry let me play with a beta of it, and the suggested tags were generally quite relevant.

There are two types of relationships the “related” tags help with. First, they suggest slightly divergent topics so you can browse off the path you were heading down. Second, they help get over the problem that people use different words to flag the same ideas; the “related” tags can help you find more sources that are directly on the path you were heading down. So they help with both digression and focus. [See my disclosure statement.] [Technorati tags: technorati tags taxonomy]

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Vimeo lets you assemble video based on author’s tags. For example, you could automatically assemble a movie about concerts, about funny things, or all the video Steve Garfield’s posted. [Thanks to Steve Garfield for the link. Steve also recommend an essay by Jakob Lodwick on Tagwebs, Flicker and the Human Brain. I haven’t read it yet.] [Technorati tags: tags taxonomy ]

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Julian Bond raises excellent issues about dealing with tag spam. The folks at del.icio.us and flickr and the like seem also to be looking at “interestingness” to increase relevancy rankings, where interestingness is some computation of the change in popularity, cluster analysis of tags, and other stuff I equally don’t understand. [Technorati tags: taxonomy tags]

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Terrific speech — provocative, funny, asking great questions — by Stephen Downes (transcript mp3) about what we can do to keep tags from forming power laws that suppress community. How can tags encourage community? He suggests embedding a pointer to FOAF files in RSS feeds, but the presentation is much broader than that. (Here’s a post of mine that relates to one point he makes.) [Thanks to Scott Rosenberg for the link.] [Technorati tags: tags taxonomy Downes ]

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I find it interesting that I haven’t seen a new age tagging app that gives special social weight to the tags the authors of works create. Obviously authors get to sort their resources by the tags they’ve assigned, but when it comes to make sense of the aggregation of tags, authors’ tags have no special weight.

This isn’t a criticism. Rather, it’s an observation about how reader-centric we’re becoming.

It also is another signal that we are shifting from topics to interests. Topics get declared by authorities and have authority. They are assumed to have some independent, trans-generational longevity. Topics can even have ontological status: A topic is what a resource is about. In the tagging world, though, a tag expresses what something means to me, the reader. It can say what something is about, but it can just as easily denote its genre (“humor”, “disclosure statements”), significance (“must read,” “nitpicking”) or its language. And if the tag expresses the resource’s topic, it’s the topic in its relevance to my interests: I might tag a custard pie recipe as “ballistic object.”

Now, along comes folksonomy, the emergence of taxonomy from the bottom up. It can occur if people get some feedback about how others are tagging resources: If I see that 500 people tag photos of San Francisco as “SanFran” and only three tag them “SF,” I will go with “SanFran” if I want my photos to be found, thus adding to that tag’s momentum.

Does this mean that folksonomies will encourage the re-emergence of topics, bottom up? Are we going to be double-minded, applying one tag for the folksonomy so the resource can be found and others that reflect our own interests? ? (If we also start tagging for local folksonomies — our social networks — we may become multi-minded in our tagging.) Are topics dead or are we rebuilding them in our images? [Technorati tags: tags taxonomy folksonomy ]

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I wrote the current issue of Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0 newsletter, a looong piece on taxonomies and tagging. Esther has given me permission to post the introduction to the article. It attempts to give an overview of taxonomies, trees, faceted classification, tags and folksonomies. Here’s how it begins:

The narrative that tells of the first man and woman encountering the tree of knowledge focuses on its tempting fruit. But after we took the bite, we apparently looked up and got the idea that knowledge is shaped like the tree’s branching structure: Big concepts contain smaller ones that contain smaller ones yet. Over the millennia, we have fashioned the structures of knowledge in just such tree-like ways, from the departmental organization of universities (liberal arts contains history and history contains ancient Chinese history) to the hierarchy of species. The idea that knowledge is shaped like a tree is perhaps our oldest knowledge about knowledge.

Now autumn has come to the forest of knowledge, thanks to the digital revolution. The leaves are falling and the trees are looking bare. We are discovering that traditional knowledge hierarchies that have served us so well are unnecessarily restricted when it comes to organizing information in the digital world. The principles of organization themselves are changing now that they are being freed from the constraints of the physical world. For example …

Click here to read the rest of the introductory section… [Technorati tags: taxonomy tags folksonomy ]

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Marco Montemagno has an idea to help people aggregate blogs that express opinions: Tag your post with “opinionradar” and the topic. He explains it here.

He asked me via email what I think, and I responded. He’s generously posted my response on his site. Here’s what I said:

I think the general idea is good and that something like it will succeed, but I think it’s more likely to come from some huge player, especially Google.

I’m very interested in seeing how tagging becomes a differentiated space instead of the flat space it is now. Already people are suggesting using prefixes as de facto category tags. E.g., Global Visions, a Berkman Center project, suggests that you tag blogs that give insight into their countries with a “gv:” tag, as in “gv:ghana.” As these prefixes proliferate, we’re going to have the same problem as with the DNS: What happens when Gelber Vistavision (or some other company) starts tagging its stuff “gv:”?

So, I think it’s a huge issue, and I suspect it will be addressed definitively by sites that have the clout to convince taggers to adopt their tag sets. Alternatively, it’s possible that the grassroots will adopt a general purpose tag set before sites like Google do, but if we do, I suspect we’ll adopt not a single tag here and there (gv or opinionradar) but a few of them all at once, in relation to one another, e.g., “dc-author:” and “dc-language:”. (I say “dc” because the Dublin Core would love for us all to adopt its categories.)

That’s what I think at the moment, fwiw.

[Technorati tags: tags taxonomy folksonomy]

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While del.icio.us is delicious, fac.etio.us isn’t facetious. It’s a thought experiment embodied in software from Siderean, a company that creates faceted classification systems for big-ass enterprises. (Note the “facet” in “fac.etio.us”? Damn clever!)

Faceted classification assigns a set of parameters (facets) to the objects it’s classifying and then lets users sort them using the facets in any order. For example, appointments in your calendar might have facets for time, date, person, location, subject, and importance. You could then ask to sort first by person, then by location, and then by date, and a minute later walk through them by importance, then date, then subject, etc. In short, faceted classification systems let you construct trees with the roots and branches in whatever order suits you at that moment. And faceted systems never lead you down branches that have no fruit.

So, Siderean is playing around with doing a faceted classification of about five days’ worth of bookmarks at del.icio.us. In an email, this is what Bradley Allen, the founder and CTO, says:

Currently this is being updated hourly from three feeds: delicious, delicious/popular, and my own inbox feed. The RSS feeds are being transformed into slightly richer RDF using the Dublin Core and SKOS vocabularies, then loaded into Seamark and made navigable using dc:subject (tag), dc:creator, dc:publisher (site), dc:moderator (feed) and dc:date as the facets.

At the fac.etio.us home page you’ll see all five facets exposed: tag, creator of the tag, site tagged, the feed it was found in (del.icio.us, del.icio.us/popular, and Brad’s feed), and the date the tag was created. You can click on any, but let’s say we click on one of the entries in the list of Tags: Music. We are taken to a page that lists all the bookmarks tagged “music,” but are also shown a list of all the other tags given to all pages tagged with “music,” all the people who have tagged a page “music,” all the feeds that contain bookmarks tagged “music,” and every day in which someone has used the “music” tag. Each of these is itself clickable.

Oh, to hell with describing it. Give it a try!

[Technorati tags: taxonomy tags siderean fac.etio.us]

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I’m in San Francisco with a free day, waiting for my daughter to join me for a weekend of tourism (if the weather permits planes to leave from Boston today). So, I’m spending the morning at Technorati (see my disclosure statement), having lunch with Irina Slutsky who’s writing about blogs for Red Herring, and then I have an appointment to talk with The Eleanor Rosch, a polymath at UC Berkeley who unhorsed Aristotle. I’m thrilled about meeting Prof. Rosch and don’t know where to begin asking her questions.

Later: What a day. I didn’t have enough time at Technorati, but it was great seeing The Gang. Lots going on there and, no surprise, it feels like a startup (which is a good thing). Irina and I talked for over three hours. and I got to spend almost two hours with Prof. Rosch whose career of thought I admire deeply. My head is swimming. (You know, that’s an awfully ugly image.)

And my daughter Leah arrives in a couple of hours. I can’t wait.

Technorati’s open office

A terrible photo of Eleanor Rosch

[Technorati tags: rosch taxonomy technorati]

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Dave is dreaming of what social tags could do for us. (I’m liking his site overall.)

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