Here’s a video of the full session I was at at Picnic ’07. It includes Walt Mossberg’s introduction, my 40 minute keynote (very similar to the presentation that I did at Google, although with a short section on the importance and difficulty of the implicit added, and some references in anticipation of the debate to follow), and then the half hour or so of my debate with Andrew Keen, moderated by Walt M.

I haven’t watched the video beyond the first few minutes — the production quality is high — but my sense of the debate was that Andrew was on an oddly anti-intellectual track, attacking me as a “professional philosopher,” which I’m not (I was an assistant professor of philosophy 22 years ago), and even if I were, why would that be a criticism, especially coming from a guy who is out arguing for the importance of credentialed authorities? Not helpful to discussing the actual topic. Frustrating. My feeling coming out of the discussion over all was indeed frustration. I didn’t think we were able to pursue points sufficiently.

BTW, somewhere in my presentation you can see me very carefully get left and right confused. Also, I’m going to plug again my more coherent attempt to explain and evaluate Keen’s argument: Andrew Keen’s Best Case. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous picnic2007 taxonomy folksonomyk ]

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Donna Maurer, an information architect, writes about how she organizes her wine, thereby answering the question: What is the opposite of miscellaneous? But who cares? She is not aiming at organizational purity, although her scheme has the attention to detail that purists often demand. But those details represent the information that matters to her, and her system lets her find and use that information…exactly as you would expect from a leading information architect. A folksonomic, tag-based wine cellar — while a fun concept — is not exactly called for here. [Tags: tags taxonomy wine donna+maurer information_architecture ia everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Tim “LibraryThing” Spalding bought a box of copies of Everything Is Miscellaneous, Lor’ bless him, and decided to hold a contest of sorts to give the remaining dozen away. So, he asked people to comment on how tagging changes knowledge. Now he’s collected a sampling of the 170 replies. Great stuff.

Also, Tim now let’s you see a reverse (inverse? converse?) tag cloud, which he calls a tag mirror. He says:

Instead of showing what you think about your books—what a regular tag cloud shows—it shows you what others think of them, in effect using LibraryThing’s twenty-two million tags to organize and surface interesting topics from within your own collection…

Here’s a for-example. I don’t use the tags gender studies, patristics or theory. They’re just not terms I use. To some extent, that reflects who I am. But I have a fair number of books that, to others, fall under those categories. It’s interesting to slice my books up in an alien way—to see them through other eyes. Maybe I’m more interested in gender studies than I thought.

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous tim_spalding folksonomies tags tag_clouds knowledge ]

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Dave Winer has dug up and made presentable some of the metadata for Flickr photos. Flickr knows more than you think!

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Tim Spalding at LibraryThing.com has introduced a new wrinkle in the tagosphere…and wrinkles are welcome because they pucker space in semantically interesting ways. (Block that metaphor!)

At LibraryThing, people list their books. And, of course, we tag ’em up good. For example, “Freakonomics” has 993 unique tags (ignoring case differences), and 8,760 total tags. Now, tags are of course useful. But so are subject headings. So, Tim has come up with a clever way of deriving subject headings bottom up. He’s introduced “tagmashes,” which are (in essence) searches on two or more tags. So, you could ask to see all the books tagged “france” and “wwii.” But the fact that you’re asking for that particular conjunction of tags indicates that those tags go together, at least in your mind and at least at this moment. Library turns that tagmash into a page with a persistent URL. The page presents a de-duped list of the results, ordered by interestinginess, and with other tagmashes suggested, all based on the magic of statistics. Over time, a large, relatively flat set of subject headings may emerge, which, subject to further analysis, could get clumpier and clumpier with meaning.

You may be asking yourself how this differs from saved searches. I asked Tim. He explained that while the system does a search when you ask for a new tagmash, it presents the tagmash as if it were a topic, not a search. For one thing, lists of search results generally don’t have persistent URLs. More important, to the user, tagmash pages feel like topic pages, not search results pages.

And you may also be asking yourself how this differs from a folksonomy. While I’d want to count it as a folksonomic technique, in a traditional folksonomy (oooh, I hope I’m the first to use that phrase!), a computer can notice which terms are used most often, and might even notice some of the relationships among the terms. With tagmashes, the info that this tag is related to that one is gleaned from the fact that a human said that they were related.

LibraryThing keeps innovating this way. It’s definitely a site to watch.

[Tags: tags folksonomy librarything tim_spalding everything_is_miscellaneous]

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The Open Library project has opened the doors on its demo, and it is a big, big deal. Read the about page (written by Aaaron Swartz) to see how exactly promising this project is.

From my provincial point of view, the Open Library Project addresses the miscellaneous nature of books: Lots of editions, lots of variants, lots of relationships.. So, include everything you can and enable the creation of rich metadata.

This is exactly the sort of infrastructure of meaning Everything Is Miscellaneous is so excited about. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous libraries metadata wikis ]

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GalaxyZoo is a mechanical Turk site that uses the “If everyone classifies just one galaxy…” approach. So far, they have a million done. (Thanks to Timo Hannay for the link.) [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous timo_hannay mechanical_turk astronomy science ]

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Thomas Mann (no, not that one) has a fascinating and important article about why tagging, folksonomies, and the rest of the hip Web 2.0 stuff is inadequate to meet the needs of scholars looking for information. It is, at least informally, a response to the Calhoun Report.

His example of trying to find information about “tribute payments in the Peloponnesian War” is classic and utterly convincing: Finding what the scholar needs requires smart human guides and the smart guides that humans have created for scholars.

But, of course that doesn’t scale…

More at Everything Is Miscellaneous…

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Samuel Wantman, who works on Wikipedia‘s category strategy, has suggested that every hyperlinked word in every Wikipedia article be treated as a tag.

What a cool idea! It’d frequently give you so many articles that it wouldn’t be worth it, but especially if we were able to do intersections of the hyperlinked words, there are times when it’d be worth its weight in bits.

Apparently, however, this would require so much processing power that the lights on the Eastern seaboard would dim every time someone used it. So, perhaps it’s a project that a third party could undertake? Or refine? [Tags: wikipedia samuel_wantman tagging folksonomy everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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I was just on a panel at the Endeca user conference where the co-founder, Pete Bell, asked: “Resolved, tag clouds are the mullet of the Internet.” I enjoyed it, and it started a good conversation.

My view: Sure, they’re sometimes used just because they’re “in.” But they can also serve a real purpose. Jim from Buzzillions pointed out that a tag cloud, when users understand it(as most don’t, apparently) implicitly says “This is your data.” And, of course, there are places where tag clouds are just plain useful.

Still, it was an amusing way of posing the question.

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