Welnu, straks begin ik aan mijn tweede semester als lesgever en ik kijk er al naar uit. In die mate zelfs, dat ik er 's nachts al van droom. Hoewel dat een combinatie kan zijn van drukte op het werk, de zwoele nachten, de start van de toch altijd spectaculaire Olympische Spelen en ja, misschien zelfs van die Leffe.

En wat heb ik dan wel gedroomd? Je zal het niet geloven. Ik was opeens een verwoed verzamelaar van alle mogelijke sportkrantenknipsels. En uiteraard wilde ik die op een logische en bruikbare manier ordenen. Urenlang heb ik in bed liggen zweten met het uitwerken van een thesaurus. Moet ik aparte categorieën voorzien voor mannen en vrouwen? Zijn de Olympische disciplines aparte sporttakken of komen die bij de doordeweekse sporten als voetbal, atletiek of kleiduifschieten? Moet ik niet eerder met een folksonomy werken? En last but not least: hoe zit het met de juridische aspecten van mijn knipselverzameling?

Het wordt tijd dat het september is...

Folksonomy is a non hierarchical organization system based on common usage of words. A taxonomy made by the regular folks like you and me. The main advantage of using tags is that people can organize content in a way that is both personalized as well as constructed on popular and common usage. The problem is that tags might be too loose for an organizational format. Among other things, content ordered by loose tags often has problems of polysemy, synonymy, and depth (specificity) of tagging.

Lets imagine someone tags a specific content with “apple”: are they talking about the fruit, the company or The Beatles record label? In this case we face a problem of polysemy. But even if there are a clear univocal definitions available, different people may use different synonymous to tag content. For example, I might use “car” while someone else use “automobile”. Finally, levels of specificity may very across tags. I might tag something as “technology” while others might tag it “microprocessor”. Other challenges include acronyms as well as plural/singular tags.

The other main issue is the structure of incentives to collect (e.g., bookmark) and tag content. In short, when bookmarking sites become popular, people bookmark and tag content not according to their surfing habits using relevant tags but rather with the purpose of “gaming” the bookmarking system in order to provide relevance to links they want to drive traffic to. This renders the bookmarking system irrelevant.

More to the point, even if people where not gaming the system and even if we could agree on a level of hierarchy so that some sort of pre define structure can be provided to tags, tags and bookmarks still remain sob optimal methods to deal with information overload. At some point, we are going to get more content per tag that we can digest.

Clearly dealing with the challenges tags and bookmarks face can go a long way, but certainly at some point there we are going to face more content that that we could possible digest.

As far as I can see, if we can get tags to deal seamlessly with the challenges I just described then they are bound to add great value in the efforts to deal with information overload. But the story won´t end there. We need a more fundamental approach to the problem in order to provide a more sustainable solution.

As I can't use tags to directly influence the items which are posted with tags I have to manipulate them in a different fashion. The work related and context based items are released at a later time, as the blog posting occurs only for the day they are posted I can make them visible the next day or at a later date when I think it's appropriate.

Folksonomy is a term I've come across recently in a couple of articles and on my company's blog. To begin with, taxonomy is the science of classification - that's my understanding. The way in which content creators/librarians/administrators, etc... create categories to classify information.

Folksonomy is play on the word taxonomy. Its how "folks", normal people like you and me and the general web community can add our own labels known as "tags" to information. A good example is Youtube, Del.ico.us and Flickr and blogs. When you upload information or media, each of these allows the user to apply our own "tags" to create our own categories to search. For example when I finish writing this post on this blog, I have the option of creatiing new tags which allow others and myself to find it when the search function is used. It also will put it in a category allowing others to see it. So I'll add tags like "taxonomy", "folksonomy", "metadata", etc...

A classical example of a taxonomy is dewey decimal system used for books in libraries. It is a system to classify the hundreds of millions of books, so that users can find books. Folksonomies differ because the user can add their own labels, effectively creating our own kind of dewey decimal system.

The strength of folksnomies is that it allows more users to create labels (tags or if your really nerdy - "metadata") and is more useful in a system where there are even more information to categorise. In the past, taxonomies were restricted to administrators like librarians or authors (content creators). But now, with the explosion of information, videos, pictures, websites being uploaded and shared on the internet - folksnomies has had its greatest use. It allows scalability - it can grow with the more users and more information that is shared.

I've actually being using tags for a while - for my own blogs. It is an easy to keep track of everything and to search for posts. Because I know in my mind what kind of tags I would use.

The second strength of tags is that users are better equipped to label their own information because they are more engaged with the content and have a deeper interaction with it. For example, if I read an article that I like and add it to the social bookmarking site "Del.ico.us" (now www.delicous.com), I will add in labels about what I feel the article is about. I would have read the article, thought about it, etc.. and put related tags opposed to a search engine that uses web crawlers that would scan for the keywords in the article.

However, this is also a weakness of folksonomy because the user is biased as to what that article is about - different users can potentially put vastly different labels. Further, users can use the same labels for different things. As this paper mentions, the tag ANT can refer to "Actor Network Theory" but also "Apache ANT" a programming language. So folksnomies is not without its problems.

One of the interesting things I found with Delicous is that when you are about to save a link and add in your tags, it will actually recommend tags that other people have put on there. I look at them and think "ok, that sounds alright" and you can click on those links - that is one way to help users add labels and create consistency across tagging. I can also add in my own tags as well and ignore the recommended ones.

Folksonomies allow users to create new terms and to start creating paths for finding things. It also can introduce you to new information or media, because you can click on a category or tag and discover what other people have posted up under the same tag.

And to clarify, metadata is the search terms or tags you put into a page, allowing web crawlers to find your information. It is important when putting in the terms for metadata to think of all the various terms a user might type in to find something - for example if you have a company webpage about soccer, you also want to use the term "football" which is what the rest of the world calls it. So the page wont get rejected if people dont type in soccer.

I'm out like folksonomies,

Matt.

For as long as tag clouds have been a feature of the web, they've also been an object of futurist optimism, kindling images of Edward Tufte and notions that if someone could just unlock all those dense far-flung pages of information, just present them correctly, illumed, people everywhere would nod and understand. Their eyes would grow bright, and they would smile at the sheer sense it all makes. The headiness of a folksonomy is sweet for an information junkie.

It's in that vein that ReadWriteWeb mythologizes the tag cloud as "buffalo on the pre-Columbian plains of North America." A reader willing to cock his head and squint hard enough at the image of tag clouds "roaming the social web" as "huge, thundering herds of keywords of all shades and sizes" realizes that the Rob Cottingham would have us believe that tag clouds were graceful and defenseless beasts—and also now on the verge of extinction. He's more or less correct.

I used to mythologize the tag cloud, but let's be honest. They were never actually useful. You could never drag and drop one word in a tag cloud onto another to get the intersection or union of pages with those two tags. You could never really use a tag cloud to subscribe to RSS feeds of only the posts with a given set of tags.

A tag also never told you whether J.P. Morgan was a person or a bank. A tag cloud on a blog was never dynamic, never interactive. The tag cloud on one person's blog never talked to the tag cloud on anyone else's. I could never click on one tag and watch the cloud reform and show me only related tags, all re-sized and -colored to indicate their frequency or importance only in the part of the corpus in which the tag I clicked on is relevant.

But there're also a cool-headed thoughts to have here. If tag clouds don't work, what will? What is the best way to navigate around those groups of relatively many words called articles or posts? In the comments to Jarvis's post, I asked a set of questions:

How will we know when we meet a visualization of the news that’s actually really useful? Can some visualization of the news lay not just another path to the “hot topic” but a better one? Or will headlines make a successful transition from the analog past of news to its digital future as the standard way we find what we want to read?

I believe the gut-level interest in tag clouds comes in part from the sense that headlines aren't the best way to navigate around groups of articles much bigger than the number in a newspaper. There's a real pain point there: scanning headlines doesn't scale. Abstracting away from them, however, and focusing on topics and newsmakers in order to find what's best to read or watch just might work.

I think there's a very substantial market for a smarter tag cloud. They might look very different from what we've seen, but they will let us see at a glance lots of information and help us get to the best stuff faster. After all, the articles we want to read, the videos we want to watch, and the conversations we want to have around them are what's actually important.

• Als erstes fällt die neue Oberfläche ins Auge, die um Welten schöner anzusehen ist als die alte. Dies könnte vielleicht dazu beitragen, dass etwas weniger Web2.0-Affine nach dem ersten Besuch nicht sofort abgeschreckt werden. Die alte Oberfläche wirkte doch etwas nerdig.
• Die Navigation unterteilt sich nun in die Kategorien "Bookmarks", "People" und "Tags". Unter Tags findet man dann beispielsweise seine eigene Tag-Cloud.
• Die Suchoptionen wurden erweitert.
• Die Sortierung der eigenen Bookmarks kann einfach verändert werden.
• Vor allem gefällt mir die neue, sehr übersichtliche Darstellung der Bookmarks. Zum einen ist deutlicher hervorgehoben, wieviele Nutzer eine URL getaggt haben, zum anderen sind die vergebenen Tags übersichtlicher dargestellt. Es kann zwischen drei verschiedenen Ansichten gewählt werden.
• An der Seite werden die 10 Top-Tags eines Nutzers angezeigt. Wahlweise kann man sich auch alle Tags anzeigen lassen.
• Oben rechts findet man zudem eine Box mit möglichen Aktionen, die angepasst werden, je nachdem wo man sich gerade befindet. Vor allem gefällt mir dabei die Funktion "Look up a URL", die über die Startseite ausgeführt werden kann. Hier kann eine URL eingegeben werden, um zu sehen, von wem die Seite gespeichert und getaggt wurde.

Wer das neue Layout nicht mehr vor Augen hat, kann sich auch dieses Video auf Flickr ansehen, das vom Delicious-Team erstellt wurde und schön zusammenfasst, was sich geändert hat.

Meiner Meinung nach hat das Team von Delicious sehr gute Arbeit geleistet. Die neue Oberfläche trägt wesentlich zur Verbesserung der Usability der Seite bei!

I was invited by John Kingston to take part in a BETA testing of HotGrinds - The Debating Society.

You are given the possibilities to create a topic for debating and comment on for or against views. The arguments can be backed up with evidence, and are voted up or down by fellow user.

I don't see any boxes for flames, that must be why it's still in beta.

technorati tags: web2.0, folksonomy, debate

As my posts are automatically send as tweets this means that I need to add the #hashtags to my subject line. From a SEO point of view the way the permalinks are created it's an excuse to create better indices of the URLs.

technorati tags: folksonomy, microblogging, tagging

I always saw Digg as an reversed /. format which added the ability to moderate not the comment, but the posts themselves.

technorati tags: social, networking, news, folksonomy

I wonder how they will keep the database clean from other sites which aren't blogs.

technorati tags: blogging, folksonomy

They should really lay off the crack.

technorati tags: sex, virtual, world, vr, reality, google

First I wanted to see how the messages are polled, so I crafted a wget command to retrieve some example data:

wget -nv --http-user="*username*" --http-passwd="*password*"
https://s.gnipcentral.com/publishers/digg/activity/current.xml

You need to create an account before you can use Gnip, and it's important to remember to quote the username and password. Your username is your mail address and some shells treat @ as a special character.

Gnip gave me a an output file:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><activities><activity guid="http://digg.com/odd_stuff/What_It_s_not_part_of_the_show_PIC" type="submission" uid="andrewcsayer" at="2008-07-10T09:50:31-04:00"/><activity guid="http://digg.com/tech_news/OSS_News_Review_Releases_OSS_Visibility_Index_for_June_2008" type="submission" uid="bhartzer" at="2008-07-10T09:50:30-04:00"/><activity guid="http://digg.com/educational/Karnataka_Diploma_CET_Results_2008_Check_Now" type="submission" uid="mastisearch1" at="2008-07-10T09:50:28-04:00"/>...

As the schema is currently unavailable I had to take the documentation and figure out the requirements myself.

The root element is the <activities> tag. It has one underlying element <activity> which has 3 attributes which can contain any values that the subscriber would like to be able to search on.

UID - The identifier for the owner of the messages, that would be username or mail address or name.
TYPE - The type of message, in the case of twitter this would be called a tweet. (That is is Twitter was supported.) It could contain an action, or it could also contain a subject.
GUID - In a number of the existing publisher this is the URL where more data can be retrieved.
AT - The data at which the message was created.

What was your idea?

I hear you ask, I though it would be handy to receive notifications from mailing lists. Specifically Linux Kernel Mailing List, this is such a high volume mailing list that you really don't want to get it in your mailbox unless you participate.

So how would it be done?
First we setup a procmail filter which can process the mail:

:0 # process lkml
* ^(To|From|Cc):.*linux-kernel@*
|lkml2gnip.sh

I didn't actually write lkml2gnip.sh as I don't really want to become just another storage point for lkml archives, but I can use this entry point to poll the lkml RSS feed at lkml.org or lkml RSS feed at kerneltrap.org.

A simple XSL Transform would be able to convert the messages from the RSS feed, so that's what I'll be playing with tonight. Here's how the elements in RSS map to the Gnip activity attributes:

Out of interest, you can find a list of publishers here.

technorati tags: lkml, linux, kernel, mailing, list, mailinglist, gnip, api, xml, xsl, xslt, procmail, rss

Folksonomies are a very widespread concept today and also a few big magazines have understood their revolutionary approach and value.

What I’m asking to myself is: “Since a year ago, which evolution has emerged? Which new ideas are people working on to improve and empower social distributed classification?”

Before explaining which new features I’m thinking of, I would like to explain why do we need an evolution of tags at all.

I love tags. I really love, as an user, having a way to add a simple powerful metadata layer to my data without having to adopt a centralized hierarchical schema proposed by someone else.

But tags, as we now experience them, don’t satisfy me! They are messy and their widespread adoption is making them also more messy.

Take a look to popular tags’ page on Del.icio.us. How far is this from a hierarchical structure or a nice faceted strategy? Maybe too much. Too much because it’s not easy to extract a mental model out of this stuff and if you cannot use your tags, they will soon loose their power.

Yes we could add an arbitrary structure and semantic to create a better and more powerful UI over these tag clouds, but the rule #1 about folksonomies is: “leave your users free“. Your users act on a personal basis but the aggregation of their mental associations is like a live organism. The structure emerges bottom up by an implicit, quite magical, consensus.

Are you sure that is not possibile to have a better browsing interface without imposing an arbitrary (so limited, restricting, not scalable, biased…) structure?

I’m not sure so I’m here to propose a different more powerful yet not restricting approach.

Continues @ infospace.it

This paper examines user-‍generated metadata as implemented and applied in two web services designed to share and organize digital media to better understand grassroots classification. Metadata - data about data - allows systems to collocate related information, and helps users find relevant information. The creation of metadata has generally been approached in two ways: professional creation and author creation. In libraries and other organizations, creating metadata, primarily in the form of catalog records, has traditionally been the domain of dedicated professionals working with complex, detailed rule sets and vocabularies. The primary problem with this approach is scalability and its impracticality for the vast amounts of content being produced and used, especially on the World Wide Web. The apparatus and tools built around professional cataloging systems are generally too complicated for anyone without specialized training and knowledge. A second approach is for metadata to be created by authors. The movement towards creator described documents was heralded by SGML, the WWW, and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. There are problems with this approach as well - often due to inadequate or inaccurate description, or outright deception. This paper examines a third approach: user-‍created metadata, where users of the documents and media create metadata for their own individual use that is also shared throughout a community.

Continues @ Adammathes.com

When I began to become enraptured with Web 2.0 I wanted to find ways to use intelligent, emerging instruments from the semantic web to continually improve findability and search optimization of resources I had gathered over many years, even if my own PC broke down and all my back up systems failed, and my own memory became faulty, or . . . I had hoped that blogging would help me remember where I put things that might someday be useful again.

The catalyst for "Folksonomy: optimizing soul searching" was a question regarding how absent categories impose their presence through their very absence. Faced with closed field category/subcategory options offered by Digg for example, under which I had to place my article, etc I struggled between philosophy or society, finance or economics, environment or politics.

I have also found it enlightening to find under which categories my own Creative Commons blogs, articles, posts and images might appear.

As my own sites grow organically, my categories and parent categories constantly need to be reformulated; new tags added and others deleted or merged. The goal is efficiency and elegance in the ungainly word of "findability" or search engine optimization, potent instruments in the semantic web.

At times I am frustrated by the absence of categories that exclude entire populations and conversations. Recently I came across a site hosted by the Washington Post. In their About page they describe how they use the limitless space of the online world to host a blog entitled "On Faith" which invites "intelligent, informed, eclectic, respectful,fruitful, intriguing and constructive conversation-among specialists and generalists about the things that matter most, religion, the most ancient of forces, the most pervasive yet "least understood topic in global life."

I read comments and the post from David Grant, a junior at Virginia Tech who commenting on his visit to the Baha'i gardens in Haifa,Israel-Palestine (which has recently been named as an International Heritage Site) remarking on the broad reach of the Baha'i religion. "Where else on Earth could you find a family from the Bible Belt, a pair of South Africans currently working in Japan, and a crew of Peruvians all heading to say their prayers at the same spot?"

I wanted to search "On Faith" for more strings on the Baha'i but realized that Baha'i World Faith was not offered in their pop-up menu of "List Posts by Topics" which did include: Anglican, Atheist/Agnostic, Buddhist, Catholic, Christian, Earth-based Spirituality, Eastern Orthodox, Episcopal, Evangelical, Greek Orthodox, Hindu, Jewish, Mainline Protestant, Mormon, Muslim, Native American religion, Protestant, Quaker, Sikh, Taoist, Wiccan.

As of February 2008 there were 5,000,000 Baha'is in the world and 159,692 Baha’is in the United States. I couldn't find a figure for either Taoist or Wiccans but one site at least claimed that in 2001 there were c. 34,000 Wiccans in the US.

Baha'is promote tolerance and moderation and are anxiously concerned with the social issues of the time in which they live. Baha'is around the globe contribute to civil society at locally, regionally, nationally levels on issues and programs related to World Religion Day, interfaith relations, religious freedom, Race Unity Day, race unity, elimination of prejudice, advancement of women (CEDAW), human rights, among others. Baha'is have offices at United Nations as NGO are are prominent in international forums as invited participants acknowledged for civil moderate behaviour in the most volatile situations. Recently the U.S. Bahá’í U.N. representative Jeffery Huffines received a Friendship Award for his work “promoting cultural understanding throughout the world and at the UN Headquarters” and for serving as a “positive, guiding force” to all. It is surprising that Baha'is seem to be largely absent from this forum.

The categories offered under "List Posts by Topics" are confusing since some are parent categories for the others. The Greek Orthodox, Catholics, Protestants and Evangelical are all followers of Christ and are all therefore Christians. Which discussions take place solely under the name of Anglican, Mainline Protestants and Episcopal? In terms of the semantic web it would be far more useful to provide a theme-based "List of Topics" that is inclusive of all the groups and religions mentioned. Tags could be used to facilitate searches for a Quaker, Sikh or Baha'i or Catholic perspective, for example. I would recommend that the blog architects revisit and update their taxonomy using principles of folksonomy: what users do with words.

Years of working with research materials leads to a way of thinking with categories, subcategories; key words (tags); abstracts, descriptions, key concepts, timelines, references in .eml or similar formats. The semantic web revs up that process with powerful tools. So my blogs are always a work in progress, process works.

My own personal blogs are experimental and while I am very conscientious about what is here, I can claim no professional authority in any one field.

At this time in my life I feel as if I live outside linear time. Blog stats soar up suddenly for no apparent reason on a blog posted weeks or month ago. So I tidy it up a little. Then the graph drops sharply again with no apparent reason. I don't need to try to control it.

Outside linear time, I could just pick up threads begun months ago on Milton Friedman, the social history of Inuit, media objectivity or what we do in the name of such concepts as "memory work" or "everyday life." Through creative commons I could share all my teaching, learning and research resources without having to shorten them, tidy them up or make them ready for someone else's deadline. Take what you need and leave the rest. I would still work as hard as I could to maintain my own standards particularly in investigating , acknowledging and referencing sources of information, images, etc.

As I am creating, writing, coding, snurling, twittering, blogging, and uploading to wikipedia, social bookmark accounts, my blogs or others' etc I have absolutely no trust in anyone.

I post knowing that anything I have shared can be misinterpreted, misunderstood, misread. It can be rejected, ignored, criticized. It can be copied and pasted without my name attached. I license all my work under the Creative Commons License 3.0 SA-NC-BY but I know it cannot be enforced in most cases.

So why bother?

What I do is not based on my need to trust others in cyberspace. I do not feel as though I am an embodied link in an embodied network in linear time and space.

This is even more than that. If I use the semantic web effectively, a searcher who is not "now" from a geographic location that is not "here" can still find my arrows, my markers, hotwords and icons, index-mouse-clicks that might just help them a little in their search. Maybe I will be that searcher.

It is more important to me to work hard at providing information that is not misinformation, trying hard to be as close to the truth as is possible, to use the most powerful arguments from the most reliable texts available to me at any given time.

I am not an anthropologist nor a journalist; I am definitely not a churnalist. My responsibility to me and therefore to others in this network or not, is to post that which I believe to be useful in a way that allows others to follow a trail of truth claims should they choose.

Thirteen years ago Francis Fukuyama in Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995) questioned predictions that the Internet, the computer to computer communication network, unleashed from restrictions imposed by its creator, the Department of Defense, would herald a new organizational network constituted by small firms and individuals that would prove to be superior to large, hierarchical corporations and anarchical market relationships (Fukuyama 1995:195). Fukuyama argued that network efficiency depended on reciprocal moral judgment [1], "a high level of trust and the existence of shared norms and ethical behaviour between network members (Fukuyama 1995:195)." He contrasted the necessity of that network users share social responsibilities and obligations with hackers and other users who were "free spirits hostile to any form of authority . . . vulnerable to certain forms of normlessness and asocial behaviour."

Fukuyama furthered argued that the Internet is a community of shared values using the concept similar to Shumpei Kumon's notion of "consensus/inducement-based exchange." He felt that Internet users in the 1970s and 1980s (mainly government and academic researchers) internalized unquestioned shared values. The Internet could be kept low-cost if users respected certain ethical standards.

In 1994 two lawyers broke the Internet's code of ethics and bombarded news groups with advertisements for their services (Fukuyama 1995:196). The lawyers were not breaking any written laws and were not shamed into retreat. However, the sheer quantity of hate mail they receive, forced their server shut down.

Although the monitization of all things Internet is well underway, there is also exponential growth in cyberworld capital [2] which like cultural capital or academic capital can facilitate access to certain privileges. I am aware of ways in which users of social networking sites strategize to optimize search engine findability, to increase their hits, statistics, and cyberworld capital.

I am not certain if the success in accumulating cyberworld capital or monitizing all things Internet is made more efficient by trust?

Notes

1. Fukuyama compares network as community concept to the Japanese concept of keiretsu and its western reincarnation in American conglomerates like Gulf + West + ITT. keiretsu depends on a high level of trust.

2. Some measure cyberworld capital in terms such as "authority" as with Technorati. Others self-identify as A1bloggers.

I'm not really into the conversational aspects of microblogs, it defeats the purpose unless you are updating somebody else's microblog with information on what they are doing at the time that you are writing it. What would be handy is to tag your microblog!

technorati tags: microblogging, blogging, folksonomy

technorati tags: humor, humour, reiser, wikipedia

I was subscriber to the newsfeed Web2.0 and received this article: Writing Once, Publishing Many Times, Makes Context Critical. It describes the problem that many microblog (twitter) comments suffer from: context loss. For people following the microblog and aren't in the conversation the context is almost certainly lost on them.

The solution: Quote! Instead of just writing "Me too!" You can write: "I also want to have free stuff." It's a fair complaint, but feels like I'm reading a complaint that could have been written for USENET in 1994 when I first got online. I wonder if is Louis Gray top poster? ;)

technorati tags: usenet, microblogging, context, twitter, socialmedia, folksonomy