Fred On Something'sComments

New del.icio.us interface testing.

Thanks to Fred on Something I note that a new del.icio.us interface is testing.

I like the new look, but do I *really* have that many tags? Eeep! It’d be lovely if I could tell del.icio.us that ‘language’ and ‘languages’ were really the same thing, and that ‘french’ was one example of ‘language’ - so clicking on languages would get me french, german, english and so on - but I could then click on french to only get me french!

I like that the tags are larger when they’re more common, but would dearly like some way to combine tags, more than that, I’d like to see the inbox functioning again! Still, it’s free, and in combination with bloglines to monitor favoured tags the result makes for a killer application - so one cannot really complain! (Though the application is more deadly with the inbox!)

First of all, thank a lot for this entry. It’s always fun to see that people are interested in what we wrote

So, I think you got the point. It’s what I reproach to tags. The more you have, the less their utility. I posted something in this trend some days ago. I don’t know if you read it but there it is:

http://radio.weblogs.com/0140770/categories/onBlogs/2005/03/15.html#a107

I also discussed of the problem with people at Many-to-Many weblog (the technorati founder and many other influential social software academics). http://www.corante.com/many/

An archives of my discussion is available on my comments blog at: http://fredonsomethingcomments.blogsome.com/category/on-folksonomy/

So, I think that new technologies will emerge from this “tag” thing

PC Forum Roundtable on Tagging

Scribbles from a session led by David Weinberger and Esther Dyson at PC Forum, also posted to the wiki.

Lots of productive friction here.

David Sifry, Caterina Fake and Ross Mayfield helped with an intro to tagging. (can’t remember what I said, please edit in)

Rael Dornfest: reminds me of RDF, but the cooling is its not in format or intent

David Weinberger: Take that semantic web! We will do it ourselves with tags!

Barney Pell: tags vs. models or inference rules.
[…]

—JP Rangaswami: Was going to use tags to solve a problem in my organization. people label things differently in different cultures in the same organization. Today english might be the language, but there are perhaps 300 dialects and the labels are different. Tagging lets structure to cross-reference, where patterns emerge. Important for me in a commercial context. To let people in diff keeping it simpel and the adoption rate high. Not pushing or pulling, its a community, which is why I like social software.—

I don’t think that tags will answer to this question. Two words, in the same language, can have the same meaning. Two words, in two different languages, can also have the same meaning. Tagging can’t cope with this reality. Tag can’t be an end in itself. We need something to wrap it to give it more semantic power. It’s why languages like RDF, RDFS and OWL have been created: to add semantic power to resources, any type of resources: words, links, photos, images, movies, a car; anything can be a resource.

Meta-tags, or, the Dublin Meta Core

As we sort through tags, it’d often be useful to know who created a particular tag. And when. And in which application. And probably other stuff also. While some apps remember who created which tag (e.g., Flickr), as we begin to aggregate tags, we could use a standard way to express this tagging metadata…a Dublin Core not for objects but for tags attached to objects.

If this were to happen, it’s very likely to come from the apps that benefit from having standardized tag metadata. The most obvious suspects are the search engines. (Hmm. I may be re-having Mary Hodder’s idea.)

The technology is there, waiting to be used.

Let users tag whatever they need but change the systems that works with tags. Think about Semantic Web. Systems will need to get tags associated with a resource (picture, post, etc) and extract them. Then they will create a resource with each tags group and semantically link them. After, systems (search engine for example) will not just show results of “puck” tag if you enter “puck” in your search but also posts that contain “hockey”, “Gretzky”, etc. Take note that I’m not talking of showing related categories of tags.

Folksonomies at Etech

“A transcript from a talk with Clay, Stewart, Joshua and Jimmy.

Clay: Not a debate about the meaning of folksonomy. This is about allowing a large group of users in on organizing a large volume of material. this is usually a function of professionals, why did you do this and what have you observed:

Jimmy: launched in June, didn’t have software to support it before. First few weeks was a madhouse in English. Germans held off but then the floodgates opened with order. Became more sensible as people adjusted the categories. We let the masses categorizes because its the crazy wikipedia way.

Stewart: Activity is for the individual first. Because of the word folksonomy, people assume it is for categorization.

[…]”

two days ago I blogged about the problem of tags and proposed a partial, intuitive, solution provided by semantic web:

“[…]

How could we upgrade the tagging idea to get rid of such feature and remove a part of the responsibility of the tagging authors in the whole process? I think that the principles of the semantic web would help us to upgrade the tagging idea.

How would this work? Intuitively it would work like this:

1. Consider the group of tags that describe a resource as a resource in itself.

2. Systems like Technorati would scan posts to extract these “tag resource”.

3. After the system would semantically link all these “tag resource” according to an ontology to relate, semantically, each “tag resources”.

4. Finally when a user would make a tag search query, results would not only be the resources with the specific tag but also all the other resources according to the semantic of the tag(s) searched.

[…]”

In reply to a comment on this blog

At the beginning of this 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 […]

I share your thoughts about tagging. Me too I’m not sure of his effectiveness. Categorizing for your own while using hotmail, gmail or del.icio.us (if you didn’t take care of the social part of the system) is great. But folksonomie his at his infancy and I have doubts on his effectiveness. It’s just another way to search for stuff. The difference between conventional searching and tag searching is that the first one is used to find specific things; the other is used to search on a specific subject.

I have doubts but I have hope too. I think that what will make folksonomie works will be the systems that will integrate it. Will the system be effective to link tags semantics? By example, Technorati seem to have a good system. Few related tags and related tags are semantically linked. Take Wists, they show you a mountain of tags with or without semantic links with your searched tag. Personally, such a system isn’t useful; it just take place on your screen.

The discussion is open, but we will see the effectiveness of tags in the future…. I hope

New Technorati tag feature

Previous comments on this post: [1]

At the beginning of this 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 […]

Okay, the problem I cited above is more deep than I first thought.

Technocrati seem to use some weird heuristic on words’ semantic. The results are quite impressive, interesting and relevant. The problem is that this didn’t solve my problem.

On the other hand, you have Wists, where I see the “blogs” tag when I search for “blog”. His problem is that I’m overwhelmed by words that have “blog” in them. I think that Wists is a new system, then what when he will be more and more popular?

The problem I cited up there seem that he cannot be solved by this way. So, what to do? Some ideas came in my minds… but they are more research projects than garage programming works.

New Technorati tag feature

At the beginning of this 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 […]

It’s a really good news!

Why? Because I never know if I should use “blog” instead of “blogs” tag. This seem stupid but it is not.

feed or feeds? I think that plural is a serious problem in the tagging world.

Why? Because people who will search for “blog” tag will not see entries of “blogs” tag.

This future system will overcome, beautifully, the problem.

It’s a great thing to have developed this feature. I can’t wait to look at it.

Many-to-Many: Wists

Wists seems to be del.icio.us except an image you choose from each page you bookmark serves as its identifier. Pictures instead of text. Also, it lets you specify other Wistians as your friends. […]

1 image worth 1000 words…

the problem is that sometimes these words are long to find. Personally I don’t think that these image add enought information to entries to be usefull. The only thing it take is place in my screen.