Preoccupations

Thomas Vander Wal at St Paul's

A great pleasure yesterday to have Thomas speak at St Paul's — on 'Going Social'. A talk written for us, but anticipating Thomas' FoWA talk tomorrow, it was a great overview of social software and social networking and, no surprise, of social tagging. It meshed with much of what we're now trying to do at St Paul's, from our programme for our first year students (13 year-olds) with its introduction to online, collaborative working, to the work throughout the school on social software (now fully available to students).

               

Those attending the talk may want to explore further some of its more technical aspects — eg, folksonomy triads. Thomas has a number of key talks and blog postings online: Folksonomy (Online Information, 2005), Folksonomy Definition and Wikipedia (November, 2005), Understanding Folksonomy: Tagging that Works presentation posted (September, 2006), Understanding Folksonomy (d.construct, 2006).

Given the current impact of Facebook, it's important to gain a perspective, see its origins and limitations (specifically, but also in the context of the general state of social networking sites — let us extract our data; give us portability; let us refind stuff)

      

and remember (or discover) that quite un-Facebook-like sites are ... social. I'm grateful to Thomas for setting out all of this and more. Like him, and like Demos, I place a lot of value in social bookmarking sites (such as del.icio.us) for educational use.

Technorati tags: Thomas Vander Wal, folksonomy, social networking, social networks, social bookmarking, Facebook, del.icio.us, tagging

Community Systems

Yesterday afternoon, I went to the OII to hear Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Director of Yahoo! Research Barcelona and Yahoo! Research Latin America in Santiago, Chile:

In this talk we explore the current impact of social media or social networks, commonly called Web 2.0, where content is generated by users in sites like Yahoo! Answers, Flickr, YouTube or Del.icio.us. This phenomenon puts forward new research challenges that involves not only computer science, but also economy and psychology, just to mention a couple of related fields. We call this emerging new science, community systems, and we mention some of the issues that we are studying, as well as further open problems.

The webcast will, as ever, appear here, but here are some figures, thoughts and ideas that stuck:

• an estimated 5 billion people will be connected to the web by 2015
• today, there are 1.8 billion mobile phones
• 500 million people are expected to have mobile broadband connectivity by 2010
• the volume of internet traffic has increased 20 times in the last 5 years
• there are more than 110 million web servers

Yahoo:

• handles >4 billion page views per day
• processes 12 terabytes of data per day
• handles 2 million mail+IM messages per day

Ricardo put up a slide of what I now think of as the Bradley Horowitz creators/synthesisers/consumers pyramid (see here), followed by another of the three groups arranged in concentric circles: the history of the web has been from 'public web' (first 10 years) to 'my web' to 'our web', and consuming has now become a form of content production.

And so to user-generated content. In leading early adopter South Korea, 43.2% of the population with internet access has published UGC and 76.2% has used UGC.  Examples of our web: Yahoo! Answers (the idea originated in South Korea), LAUNCHcast (Last.fm might have worked better with his audience yesterday, but the point was taken) and Flickr — in the case of the latter, fewer than 10 employees were "aided" by millions in the Flickr community. No surprise that several times Ricardo referred to James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds. (Pointers: espgame.org; peekaboom.org.)

Yahoo!'s vision: better search through people and our trillions of artifacts. Many questions and challenges (eg, How to deal with spam?, How to establish and factor in a user's reputation?, What role does the community of users play?, What are the incentive mechanisms?, Where else can we leverage the power of the people?), but the underlying drive is to put the wisdom of crowds to work, milking query actions (breakdown: 25% informational, 40% navigational and 35% transactional). (Pointer: Yahoo!'s Mindset research site.) Semi-gnomic conclusion: Yahoo! is not seeking to personalise the search query but to personalise the search task (= active information supply driven by user activity and context).

Worth watching the screencast when it's up. There's much more in Ricardo's talk than I've tried to catch here (search language, folksonomic tagging and the inter-relatedness of meanings that Yahoo! explores in search queries …), and I came away puzzled by a couple of things said or asked about blogs, but I liked the emphasis on the web as 'scientifically young'.

Technorati tags: Yahoo!, community systems, UGC, user-generated content, search

The value in tags

My interest in Dave Sifry's State of the Blogosphere update of 1 May (previous post) lay primarily in the report that 'About 47% of all blog posts have non-default tags or categories associated with them'.

Joshua Porter, who gave us the del.icio.us lesson in a post last December, Learning more about Structured Blogging, writes now in The Del.icio.us Lesson:

Del.icio.us tags aren’t like meta keyword tags because of the Del.icio.us Lesson. Meta keyword tags provide no personal value whatsoever. All of their value is social. They’re for aggregation engines to find and tell other people about. In other words, they’re for getting attention only. Del.icio.us tags, on the other hand, provide personal value each time someone uses them to recall a bookmark. … the Del.icio.us Lesson might help us parse Dave’s statistics, especially this one: 47% of blog posts have tags or categories associated with them. If the Del.icio.us Lesson is predictive, it would suggest that nearly all of that 47% would be categories that users are applying for their personal value on their blog, rather than tags applied for attention only. Any way to separate out those numbers, Dave?

Joshua Porter's new post is interesting in its own right (the second half is particularly valuable) and it links to a number of articles I hadn't come across before, including Rashmi Sinha on why tags are easier than categories:

… the beauty of tagging is that it taps into an existing cognitive process without adding add much cognitive cost. At the cognitive level, people already make local, conceptual observations. Tagging decouples these conceptual observations from concerns about the overall categorical scheme. The challenge for tagging systems is to then do what the brain does - intelligent computation to make sense of these local observations, and an efficient, predictable way to ensure findability.

Tagging is something I'm getting my students to use and I'm hoping that it will have a good future in our work. I take to heart Joshua's advice:

Just don’t try and make it the primary thing to do. Instead, make sure personal value precedes network value. Then you’ll have plenty to aggregate.

Technorati tags: blogoshpere, tags, tagging, del.icio.us, Technorati, attention

Librarians and the future now

Yahoo! search blog — Mark Sandler, University of Michigan:

1,100 librarians recently swarmed on the seaside town of Monterey, California for a deep dive in search technology, and I was among them. Topics included desktop search, visual and clustering search, podcasting, taxonomies and metadata, RSS, blogs, wikis, online education, intranets, spyware, digitization, wireless access, and more. In today’s world of search engines, librarians are reaching way beyond the physical walls of the library.

To make library services more compelling, some librarians have begun experimenting with new virtual reference techniques like instant messenger and text-messaging to interact with patrons. Although some adults may be slow to adopt these techniques in the library, just imagine the usefulness to all the teenagers who already use instant messenger and text-messaging as their main methods of communication. Elsewhere, librarians discussed creating online library catalogs that allow patrons to tag, comment, review, share, recommend, and otherwise create a virtual community around records in the catalog. Imagine browsing through a library catalog and seeing other people’s reviews or recommendations for similar items. Sounds like what happens on many Web sites now, places like Yahoo! Local, My Web 2.0, Flickr, Furl, Amazon.com, etc.

… librarians are continuing to evolve their roles now that people rely so heavily on search engines. What does this mean?

• For search, knowing when to use particular vertical and specialty engines, specialty databases, meta-search engines, advanced search syntax for the big engines, and so forth.
• For news, helping people use RSS, email alerts … to know when new and relevant content is available online.
• For sharing information, helping people find and share with others by using blogs, wikis, and tagging.

As the world of online and offline libraries continue to converge, I think this quote summarizes the conference perfectly: “In 2020, Internet Librarian will simply be called the Librarian Conference.”             

Technorati tags: libraries, librarians, knowledge management, search, RSS, elearning

Pandora, Last.fm, MySpace

cityofsound — New Musical Experiences:

The overall model of Pandora is a fascinating alternative to Last FM, relying as it does on studied, human expert knowledge rather than software-based inferred connections. It appears to work very well at providing recommendations, which is the stated aim, though Last FM appears to be the more engaging experience and more scalable system. I suspect that welding the two approaches together into one coherent experience would deliver a very powerful system indeed. …

I've been observing myspace's development as a genuinely interesting new music experience. For example, see http://www.myspace.com/arcticmonkeys, in which fans and others can set up sites around bands and artists, containing music, images, and vibrant messageboards. These could develop into some of the more interesting new music experiences, sitting alongside Last FM and Pandora. Compared to the latter two, myspace's sites tend to be more colourful, characterful, shambolic and rich in personality. Music is deployed into this space in the form of embedded media players, with links for lyrics, videos and images alongside. In this sense, context is present as well as the music, albeit in freeform fashion, meaning that these (my)spaces become a form of combined listening/contextual experience. The music here appears as a thin veneer or layer, drifting across the experience. Music one identifies with can be adopted on personal pages within myspace, leading to 'presentation of self' opportunities which are playful and potentially powerful.… It'll be fascinating to see how myspace develops, particularly with the financial and cultural muscle of its new owner, News Corp.

The Guardian on, first, Pandora — and then Pandora and Last.fm:

"It's quite fun just putting it on when you're doing something else but I'm not sure I would use it as a music recommendation site yet," says music writer John Mullen. "It's a bit too random. And I really don't like its pretensions that it is offering some kind of universal truth about music. It just got it wrong for me too often. For example, I put in Nirvana and it was playing bands that would make Kurt Cobain turn in his grave. It's a bit crude. Often, bands that are similar on paper using their method aren't alike in reality. You could say Radiohead and Pink Floyd have similar musical 'genes' but really they create incredibly different music." Pandora is also flawed to the extent that users' personal stations, by definition, are narrowly defined. …

Pandora's top-down approach to music recommendation is in stark contrast to rival Last.fm's bottom-up approach. … "The recommendations work by finding music from users who are similar to you, who we call neighbours," says Last.fm founder, former Austrian radio DJ Martin Stiksel. "We then play you music they have listened to but which you don't have in your profile. So if you have 100 records, and 80 of them are the same, it's very likely you are going to be interested in those 20 that the other person has but which you don't. Pandora relies on a team of experts classifying the music, whereas with us it's the knowledge of the crowd, so to speak. [The crowds] know more about music, in our opinion, than a few experts." …

Both Pandora and Last.fm also have another benefit: artists and labels can submit music - providing a new way for acts to market themselves if they have been ignored by the major record labels. And Stiksel argues that they also offer the potential to steer illegal downloaders into legal ways of accessing music. "We believe in streaming rather than downloading," he says. While the recommendation sites may require fine tuning, he adds, they offer a fantastic way to navigate the ever-larger ocean of music. "In this day and age it's really difficult to find the music you like without having something like a music profile. Sites like this are going to become more and more crucial."

Technorati tags: Last.fm, Pandora, MySpace

Weird feed behaviour

1) I've had to decouple FeedDemon 1.6 RC2 (a beta) from NewsGator: the synching between the two had gone haywire, ever since a problem that developed some time around 28 December at the NewsGator end of things, and it was driving me nuts.

2) More to the point here, apologies to my FeedBurner subscribers: FeedBurner has a range of services on offer — PingShot service and FeedFlare — and, I'm not sure, but changing my options on both of these seems to have set off a riot in that feed, posts reappearing as unread a number of times and (most recently) a strange 'noemail' address appearing entirely unasked for in the headers of posts. I've reset my options within FeedBurner and I hope things will now quieten down again.

For good measure, I've been playing with Technorati tags: in TypePad these have to be entered manually (TypePad's categories are read as Technorati tags, but categories are not the same kind of animal as tags) which is a little bit of work. (Within Firefox, Performancing semi-automates the process for you.) The work's worth it when the tags are read by Technorati, but I'm finding the process more miss than hit. As ever, Dave Sifry is very supportive, but we still haven't cracked the problem. Niall Kennedy at Technorati suggests it may be feed-related, which led me to validate my feed and the feed of a number of blogs. Errors abound everywhere, which made me feel a bit better. I still can't get the Technorati tags to work consistently, though, and the most recent ones have simply gone unnoticed by Technorati's spiders.

Web 2.0. Dontcha just luv it.

Technorati tags: Technorati, FeedBurner, FeedDemon, NewsGator

Jeff Jarvis on tagging

Well, I've had a geeky good time with the subject of tags. But this isn't just another valentine to just another cool online trend; we're so over that. No, tags have a larger lesson to teach to media. They present a clear demonstration that the web is not about flat content. The web is about connections and the value that arises from them if you enable people to collect and communicate. In the old, big, centralised, controlled world of media, a few people with a few tools - pencils, presses and Dewey decimals - thought they could organise the world and its content. But as it turns out, left to its own devices, the world is often better at organising itself. Jeff Jarvis, Media Guardian

Technorati tags: tags, tagging

Structured blogging

Structured blogging is back.

This is a marker so I don't lose sight of what might be a significant development next year.

Structured Blogging is a way to get more information on the web in a way that's more usable. You can enter information in this form and it'll get published on your blog like a normal entry, but it will also be published in a machine-readable format so that other services can read and understand it. Think of structured blogging as RSS for your information. Now any kind of data - events, reviews, classified ads - can be represented in your blog. Structured Blogging

Almost immediately, controversy. The engaged but non-technical punter is bound to be confused. On the one hand, Stowe Boyd:

My bet is that Structured Blogging will fail, not because people wouldn't like some of the consequences -- such as an easy way to compare blog posts about concrete things like record reviews, and so on -- but because of the inherent, and wonderful messiness of the world of blogging. Because blog posts don't have to conform to any structural standards, they can be used to do anything: nothing is out of bounds, because we haven't created the boundaries. The messiness of the world we are living in is one of the reasons that it is such a rich and rewarding experience. I am not sure who is benefitted if everyone falling into line and adopting consistent standards for the structure of blog posts. Perhaps companies like PubSub -- one of the driving force behind all this -- who would like to be able to sort out all the blog posts about hotels, gadgets, and wine out there, and aggregate the results in some algorithmic fashion, and then make money from the resulting ratings and reviews. But I am not sure that it would be a better world for bloggers, or even blog readers. So I favor the microformat approach, which is messy, puts more of a burden on the blogger, and will require a host of tools to be built to make it all work. But microformats will work bottom-up -- tiny little tagged bits of information buried in the blog posts -- as opposed to structurally. And I am betting -- as always -- on bottom-up.

This feels right to me, but the idea that 'The promise of structured content is that we would have an explosion of software aggregating it into useful, specialized services' (bokardo) is attractive (of course) and when I find David, Marc and Thomas all lining up behind it …

Another source of confusion is the link between this, or the lack of link between this, and microformats. Bob Wyman explains that structured blogging is what we do and microformat is just what it says on the can — the format we use: 'The two concepts are orthogonal. They don't compete. They can't compete. Verbs don't compete with nouns'.

One thing seems certain: if it's as unclear as this, how on earth will it take off (assuming it should)?

David Weinberger at the OII

Back in July, 2004, I came across David Weinberger's post about Three Orders of Organisation, and then I read about his idea of Trees vs Leaves. You can read him on the former here and the latter here. The material behind and in these two postings formed much of the substance of David's seminar at the OII on Wednesday morning. In addition, I've come across a third posting, The end of data?, which also fed in to what he said this week in Oxford. There's a book on the way, Everything Is Miscellaneous — overview here — and there's a summary of an earlier version of yesterday's talk here. Finally, the OII has a webcast of the talk.

The seminar was a whistle stop tour of some "high" points in the development of taxonomies — Aristotle on nesting, Porphyry's tree, Dewey and library classification (David has blogged about Dewey a number of times, eg here and here): 'all of these systems assume there's a top down view of knowledge' and seek to banish ambiguity and present a clear picture of reality/knowledge. Everything in its right place …

But in the bottom-up world of social tagging an item can be in many categories simultaneously (I don't think 'tags' are the same as 'categories', but I'm running here with the general tenor of David's argument), and users are contributors both to the stock of tagged items and to their ordering. In this world, trees will never go away, but we need to stop looking for The Tree. Instead, we should build a big pile of data (leaves), attach as much metadata as possible and filter on the way out not on the way in. Users will do the filtering, and the moment of "taxonomizing" should be postponed until the users need to do it. There is now nothing that is not metadata — data is metadata — and we can no longer predict what users want. Messiness is a virtue.

David sees this bottom-up approach to tagging as a reaction to the semantic web. There is no end to the way the deck of digitalised knowledge in this world can be cut and sliced. (Wikipedia, as Jimmy Wales says, is not paper: for one thing, David said, where the Encyclopedia Britannica restricts itself to 32 printed volumes and 65,000 topics, Wikipedia has no such restrictions and is currently running at some 800,000 entires — including ones on the Deep-fried Mars Bar and, famously, the Heavy Metal Umlaut.) In the world of multi-subjectivity, knowledge is never going to be "perfect". Instead, we must think in terms of 'good enough'. We are living through a revolution, a fundamental change to the way we understand knowledge and our pursuit of it. The global conversation that is the net changes the roles of filters and, therefore, our understanding of what a filter is.

In the questions at the end of his talk, it seemed to me that in fact David is prepared to admit much more nuance and to accept that top-down taxonomies are not going to go away. And, yes, he agreed that the web is both a distributed library as well as being something that is about and for connectivity. It was put to him that the top-down, authoritarian conception of the semantic web is only one model, and that there are other models where the semantic web is bottom up. I share the view developed by him and his questioner at this point, that the net can provide for many different ways of organising knowledge. And I'm sure he's right when he says that soon we will see people making a living through devising new classificatory systems.

There's a problem of scale, too: as David put it, too many taggers can make for an unhelpful, confusing tag-soup, counterable, perhaps, through cluster-analyses intended to disambiguate (eg, Flickr's Capri clusters). But in David's view, if 'good enough' is good enough then scaling should not prove a problem.

So is "good enough" good enough? Tom Chance probed whether it's sufficient in matters more important than the examples David used (eg, beer): when it comes to deciding about nuclear power, 'good enough' is surely short of the mark. My colleague, Ian, linked this point to one about the role of institutions in this new world. They're highly unlikely to go away (!), but the morning's seminar left me in no doubt that trust, and the verification of trust, in institutions is altered by the rise of online, do-it-yourself mass publishing. Yet, as Jonathan Zittrain said in his summing up, the desire for the canonical article on a topic continues.

At the start of his talk David remarked, 'This could be the bright, shiny period of the internet, of openness'. The net gives us many reasons to be happy, but there are many forces at work which may make history of David's visionary presentation. More about this soon.

Technorati

Techcrunch:

Niall Kennedy at Technorati has just informed me that they have quietly updated their tag search engine with full boolean search functionality. In August, Technorati added the OR function to tag search. … They’ve now added AND and NOT functions …

The leaving of Liverpool

We had much less time in Liverpool yesterday than we'd hoped for: beware, traveller — the M5 and M6 have so many roadworks … I lost count, the journey up taking almost twice as long as it should have done.

So, a rushed job when it came to the Albert Docks and a bit of the centre, but enough to make me appreciate what a mighty city this has been … and how vibrant it is today, with all its possibilities and problems: European City of Culture, 2008, yet Liverpool University (where one of our sons is studying) lies cheek-by-jowl with some of the worst inner city areas I've seen in the UK.

Down in the Docks, the Tate is very fine. We had enough time to take in the New Realism room in the DLA Piper Series: International Modern Art. I liked the early Chapman brothers' piece, Disasters of War, which I'd heard a lot about and not seen before, the Grayson Perry pots, Germaine Richier's Storm Man and Hurricane Woman, the Giacometti portraits (of his brother, Diego) … I want to come back to Liverpool many more times, see much more of the city, get round all of the Tate and see the Walker and Lever galleries.

When we got back home, there was Tom Coates' posting to read: On the BBC Annotatable Audio project ... — 'a demonstration of a functional working interface for the annotation of audio that's designed to allow the collective creation of useful metadata and wikipedia-like content around radio programmes or speeches or podcasts or pieces of music'. Euan Semple comments: 'After 21 years working in broadcasting I reckon this is one of the coolest things to happen for a very, very long time. The ramifications of this will go very deep indeed'.

All the more fitting that our journey back took in some good to outstanding radio on Radio 4. I'd pick out here:

• Antony Beevor and Gillian Slovo discussing the significance of novelist and war reporter Vasily Grossman with Francine Stock (Great Lives). A towering figure — to protect his second wife and her children, whom he'd adopted, he dared even to misquote Stalin in a letter to the head of the NKVD — his masterpiece, Life and Fate, was published after his death. I'm ashamed to say I've never read it, but it's now on my list for the Xmas break.



• David Cannadine exploring the way the UK we know today differs so much from that of those whose lives were rooted primarily in the first half of the twentieth century (A Point of View): if you're in your mid-40s to mid-60s, you didn't know a world dominated by two World Wars and the greatest economic slump the modern world has ever experienced; instead, the social disruption of the Butler Education Act, plus the immense amount of money poured into education, created a country where, for all its faults, "those in charge" today do not have to be the product of inherited or privately financed privilege — he cited (as examples) grammar school boys Melvyn Bragg (In Our Time), Andrew Turnbull (former Cabinet Secretary) and Mervyn King (Governor of the Bank of England). These short programmes are his for the next 13 weeks and he seems to be setting out to look at the role Universities play in our society and how they are to be funded.

Canter on Web 2.0

Matt Gertner:

… we should be wary of writing Web 2.0 off as vacuous before it has a realistic chance of achieving its potential, particularly since this is likely to take several years. … Web 2.0 may be a messy term, and it’s undeniably over- (and frequently mis-) used. But it’s still a useful way of encapsulating a real and important trend.

I'm all in favour of educated scepticism, but some reservations seem to fly in the face of what end-users are experiencing (and then to bring down the fundamentalist shutters on any further discussion). As usual, Richard MacManus has some sound reflections on the wave of anti-hype. (Incidentally, through his site I came across Michael Casey's LibraryCrunch and a posting there about libraries and Web 2.0 — something to which all schools and universities need to give a lot of thought.)

I've been reading Marc Canter's Breaking the Web Wide Open!: 'The online world is evolving into a new open web (sometimes called the Web 2.0), which is all about being personalized and customized for each user. Not only open source software, but open standards are becoming an essential component'.

Open standards mean sharing, empowering, and community support. Someone floats a new idea (or meme) and the community runs with it – with each person making their own contributions to the standard – evolving it without a moment's hesitation about "giving away their intellectual property." … The combination of Open APIs, standardized schemas for handling meta-data, and an industry which agrees on these standards are breaking the web wide open right now. So what new open standards should the web incumbents—and you—be watching? Keep an eye on the following developments:

Identity
Attention
Open Media
Microcontent Publishing
Open Social Networks
Tags
Pinging
Routing
Open Communications
Device Management and Control

… Today's incumbents will have to adapt to the new openness of the Web 2.0. If they stick to their proprietary standards, code, and content, they'll become the new walled gardens—places users visit briefly to retrieve data and content from enclosed data silos, but not where users "live." The incumbents' revenue models will have to change. Instead of "owning" their users, users will know they own themselves, and will expect a return on their valuable identity and attention. Instead of being locked into incompatible media formats, users will expect easy access to digital content across many platforms.

Audioscrobbler »»» Last.fm

More tags to be thought of, played with, explored: Last.fm (my profile here) has been relaunched this week as the the true face of Audioscrobbler-as-was — Audioscrobbler is now the name of the engine powering the service. For the history, Wired ran an article in 2003 on Last.fm and Kottke picked up on it here. The comments to Kottke's post are worth reading.

Richard Jones has posted this on his Last.fm Journal:

As you've probably figured out by now, the place to be on a day-to-day basis is here, at www.last.fm.

The audioscrobbler.com site will become a technology playground and resource for developers. We'll expose everything imaginable via webservices (RSS/XML etc..). This will enable some interesting new applications. For example, with the new tagging system we could create a free service doing something similar that moodlogic offers. Plugins for winamp (or whatever) that build smart playlists based on tag and profile data from the audioscrobbler webservices will be possible.

We have the data here, and as soon as we have the webservices, I want to be able to make smart playlists in amarok based on my favourite tags. It'll also be possible for other community websites to integrate music profiles into their site. Eg: users of example.com grab a plugin, and join the example.com group. The example.com site can then pull in profile data for its users. We could even generate neighbours within groups. That would rock as a music-addon for other sites actually.. Would be good to have your a/s profile integrated into your other favourite community sites.

More news to come on this when I've thought about it a little more :)

The forums are buzzing with "discussion" — lots about the new look, the disappearance of (some) stats, the new profile editor, the absence of the grapevine … Some of the criticism on offer is worthwhile and, positive or negative, meant well, but …  As dikonstrukt said:

… constructive, well-meaning criticism on how to improve things is no doubt appreciated by the dev team. However, I think it's disgraceful the level of respect many people are showing. Whether or not you like the new site, all AS users should recognize that an enormous amount of hard work went into creating the new site. If you have some criticism, you should at the very least acknowledge that. … When you add this to the fact that many of the complainers do not even donate, it is too much to believe. … As for me, I love the new site. Sure there are issues, but I know you'll work on getting them fixed. Thanks much for coming up with an excellent new site, I will definitely start my monthly donation back up.

Netiquette! What Ben Hammersley was talking about at Reboot.

I like the new colours. Tags were what we were asking for and now we've got them! I need to play with them a lot before I can see how this is going to go. In many ways, for all the differences between photos and music, I'll be comparing and contrasting my experiences here with those at Flickr. But right now, I'm grateful to the Last.fm team and what they're giving us: there's no cooler or better site online for music lovers.

Update! This is good: see what your friends are listening to, on one page. (Ah … this is a subscriber-only feature. Subscription = $3 / £1.50 / €3 / ¥350  a month.)

Three things I'd like to see

'And another thing' — taxi-driver mode.

• A thorough reform of 'categories' in TypePad. Adding tags to a posting à la Technorati method is not effortless and categories themselves are too broad to be very useful as tags. People have been commenting on all this ever since Technorati implemented their new service back in January (Dave Sifry: 'Technorati now supports Tag Search across leading Social software sites'): eg, Suw Charman ('Until we have a way to automatically tag or create tag suggestions that can be approved or disapproved by the user, we are going to have to rely on people bothering to tag their posts') and Mathibus.com:

There’s one thing that really bugs me about all this: a tag is much more precise than a category. There is no denying that. Take this richly tagged photo of the Star Wars cast, for example. It has a lot of tags, I’m not even counting them. Seriously, there’s nothing wrong with applying that many tags to a photo. In fact, I can imagine people wanting to search for C3P0 on Flickr.

Now, imagine that photo was a blog post you made. Would you create all those new categories, just to apply them to this one post, so it could be spidered by Technorati? I think not!

We need automated, user-friendly tagging processes within TypePad and then the facility to search and exploit these tags. Just compare and contrast where Flickr is now with tags!  A major blogging service, a social software service, needs, by definition, to be affording its users rich opportunities to share, discover and explore, and tags currently have a key role to play here.

In announcing new features at Flickr last week, the most important thing (I think) that Stewart Butterfield had to say was: 'Both interestingness and clustering rely a lot on what people are doing, whether it's with the photos they like, or the tags they are using. You can think about it as people-powered searching' (Yahoo! Search Blog, my italics). Blogging services as we currently know them are very top-down. This may now come to be seen as a curious thing: I wonder how long before a tipping point is reached and people want more freedom to mash and mix and access their and other's data beyond the constraints currently set for them by their service-providers. (Jeff Weiner's got it right: FUSE — find, use, share, expand.)

• Comments. Another area where blogging software needs to be re-thought. We read each other's stuff, we like certain things, but we're too busy to post a reply/comment — or we don't have anything worth adding beyond, 'I was here, I enjoyed this, thank you'. Jyri made this point (and more) here, providing a mock up of a possible UI here. Something along the lines of gestures is needed to supplement what we already have in comments.

• Conferences/events. Both at Reboot and Open Tech, I realised only afterwards, reading on the web, that people had been present with whom I've exchanged ideas in emails, or via comments, or whose blogs are, in any case, important to me. Frustrating, as well as bizarre, then, to know you'd been in the same space as them but had had no way of recognising them beyond a name tag — or even, in some cases, of knowing they were even there! I see Thomas posted about just this a little while ago, focusing on the central problem of aggregating identities across digital communities: 'The gap between digital and physical must close'.

(Not the same thing, of course, but this might also be a useful place to remind myself, at least, about those software initiatives being made that are intended to help us discover people nearby who are interested in what we're interested in: Six Sense, Nokia's Sensor … Such programs could be a monumental distraction, but, then again, I think of those times when I've had serendipitous conversations with interesting people at plays, galleries, films. Ways in which I might enable these to happen a little more often would be good.)

Web 2.0: 'something qualitatively different about today's web'

'Web 2.0' is a big, fat target of a term, but it's not just hype. Tim O'Reilly:

The reason that the term "Web 2.0" has been bandied about so much since Dale Dougherty came up with it a year and a half ago in a conference planning session (leading to our Web 2.0 Conference) is because it does capture the widespread sense that there's something qualitatively different about today's web. … Web 2.0 is the era when people have come to realize that it's not the software that enables the web that matters so much as the services that are delivered over the web. Web 1.0 was the era when people could think that Netscape (a software company) was the contender for the computer industry crown; Web 2.0 is the era when people are recognizing that leadership in the computer industry has passed from traditional software companies to a new kind of internet service company. The net has replaced the PC as the platform that matters, just as the PC replaced the mainframe and minicomputer.

Richard MacManus sums it up: 'what Web 2.0 means to me - everyday, non-technical people using Web technologies to enhance their own lives and businesses. The Web is an infrastructure, a foundation. What we create and build on the Web is what Web 2.0 is all about.' Richard quotes Ian Davis, 'Web 2.0 is an attitude not a technology', who goes on to say:

It’s about enabling and encouraging participation through open applications and services. By open I mean technically open with appropriate APIs but also, more importantly, socially open, with rights granted to use the content in new and exciting contexts. Of course the web has always been about participation, and would be nothing without it. It’s single greatest achievement, the networked hyperlink, encouraged participation from the start. Somehow, through the late nineties, the web lost contact with its roots and selfish interests took hold. This is why I think the Web 2.0 label is cunning: semantically it links us back to that original web and the ideals it championed, but at the same time it implies regeneration with a new version. Technology has moved on and it’s important that the social face of the web keeps pace.

Davis also talks about Web 2.0, the Semantic Web, XML and RDF. (And smushing — not come across that before! Got to pass smushing on to the OED.)

Incidentally, I then went on to read Ian Davis' most recent post, 'Searching Folksonomies':

… I don’t actually visit del.icio.us all that often. For me, del.icio.us is a write-only environment. I fire and forget. I’m bookmarking because I might one day want to go back and use find it but in practice I rarely do. I seem to remember that the last time I did try to find something I’d bookmarked, I couldn’t remember the tags I’d used or even if I had bookmarked it and I ended up with Google anyway. … the fact of the matter is that tagging systems and folksonomies are great for organising, but boy do they suck when it comes to finding something. Google still wins hands down  …

He suggests a Web 2.0 solution — 'I want all the pages I’ve bookmarked to be searched and shown first whenever I search in Google. Maybe I could do this as an extension to Google desktop, but a better solution would be for Google to allow me to register my RSS feeds with them. Then, they could subscribe to my feeds to learn what I’ve recently read or bookmarked and show those at the top of any search results. That would be extremely cool and infinitely useful!'

And by association, this: I haven't yet been able to import my del.icio.us bookmarks into Yahoo's My Web. Despite following the instructions, I always arrive at an error page: 'Sorry, we were unable to detect a valid feed'. Unless, that is, I use a backup from several months ago: 850 bookmarks as opposed to nearly 2000. Is there an upper limit to how many bookmarks My Web can import at one time?

Yahoo!, web services and the desktop

Yahoo! is doing lots of interesting things. I'm not into 360 much but, given how Yahoo! is developing, I have registered and started an account. I have played with Y!Q ('Copy and paste text from your published content into the text box, or type in a query in English. Click on Y!Q Search and it does the rest, using the entered text as the context for an initial search and subsequent related searches), but need to try it and test it a lot more.

More interesting to me right now is My Web. It's extremely easy to use (I find it a much simpler UI and procedure than Furl, say). Advertised features:

Save what you like to build your own personal web

• Search and browse the web, as you do today
• Save an exact copy of any page you like - from Yahoo! Toolbar or directly from your search results
• Save thousands of pages - anything you may want later

"Re-find" pages instantly when you need them again

• Search My Web to find any of your saved pages
• Searching across full-text and your notes enables instant retrieval
• Turn on My Search History to quickly access past searches and visited results

Share your personal web

• Create categories for your saved pages - travel, projects, events
• Share your favorites with friends and colleagues - via email, IM, and RSS (Yahoo! 360° coming soon)

Better than bookmarks

• Save both an exact copy and a link - the content you save will always be there when you return
• Searchable - Organize as you wish, search for the rest
• Accessible anywhere, not just from your own computer
• Import your bookmarks to immediately experience the benefits of My Web

If I want to keep a copy of a webpage and access it anywhere, My Web is ideal. (I can't see myself going back to Onfolio.) Add the power of Yahoo! search …

Could this service displace del.icio.us for me? (There's a mulling over of this question here and SiliconBeat highlights the social nature of My Web searching.) I'm using both. My use of del.icio.us is now well-established but My Web 2.0 has made it possible for me to import my del.icio.us bookmarks. Caterina Fake, of Flickr fame, has written about My Web 2.0 here and there's a My Web blog, too — plenty to think about and follow. Vitally, though, del.icio.us allows you to export your data; My Web doesn't, as yet — see my last paragraph, below.

Then, of course, there's the Yahoo! purchase of Konfabulator, the possible implications of which for mobile online life have been noted. But the implications for the desktop market are great, too: 'Konfabulator, now part of the Yahoo empire, is a frontal assault on Microsoft desktop dominance. The future is web services, and Konfabulator provides VERY easy to develop desktop widget technology with a completely open API. … What sets Konfabulator apart from other scripting applications is that it takes full advantage of today’s advanced graphics. This allows Widgets to blend fluidly into your desktop without the constraints of traditional window borders. Toss in some sliding and fading, and these little guys are right at home in Windows XP and Mac OS X ' (Cloudy Thinking).

***

At Open Tech, Jeremy Zawodny spoke about Yahoo!'s development and the huge growth in user-generated content, present and to come. They look forward to remixing data 'from various silos', with new apps and services allowing us to see information we couldn't see before. Jeff Weiner spoke along these lines at Supernova '05: FUSE — 'Enable people to Find, Use, Share and Expand all human knowledge'. Earlier this year, John Battelle spoke with Jeff Weiner and posted his reflections:

When you think about Yahoo's search mission as an organizing principle, a lot of what Yahoo is doing - 360, MyWeb, Y!Q, the purchase of Flickr - start(s) to fall into place … (they're) using search to fuse a myriad of services and applications, all of which center on knowledge and its application. As Jeff pointed out to me, at the center of the idea of FUSE is what's happening to media - how every single medium - music, TV, print, telecom, even our first versions of the web - is being remixed and reordered by Web 2.0. It's an old saw, but mass media really is becoming my media - through RSS, podcasting, iTunes, Tivo, blogs, and many innovations to come. And central to navigating a my media world is search. Hence, the FUSE vision holds water for me - search is not just about a web index. It's about my interface to the world.

I like both Google and Yahoo's visions, to be honest, they both augur a future where control lies with us, through the questions we ask and the tracks we leave across the ever expanding web. Yahoo's focus on sharing, I think, is critical, and perhaps a key area where Google's (stated) vision may be lacking at the moment. But with so many recent innovations in that space - search history, Gmail, increased RSS support, centralized account management - I don't expect that deficit to stand for long.

***

With 360, as with Web 2.0 in general, there's the problem of my/your data being locked up inside a proprietary web-service — see above (will My Web allow us to export our data?) and this O'Reilly Radar piece. Richard MacManus has timely thoughts about this, the so-called Walled Garden effect. It's going to be absolutely vital to Web 2.0 that the walls do, indeed, come down.

Tagging: filing, annotating … and rhetoric

Tom Coates' interesting 4 June posting, Two cultures of fauxonomies collide …, suggests that tagging-with-del.icio.us, 'with an individual the only person who could tag their stuff', is like filing and treats tags as folders, whilst tagging-with-Flickr, 'you can tag other people's photos for a start', is like annotating and treats tags as keywords.

So two radically different forms of tagging that really share very little in common with one another - which leads to the question, is there room for two different paradigms here (at least) or will there be some refactoring and adaptation that moves us towards one or other model? … It is my conjecture that the folder metaphor is losing ground and the keyword one is currently assuming dominance.

I'm not persuaded that the two worlds, del.icio.us and Flickr, do use tagging in such radically different ways (certainly, I've been using tags-as-folders and tags-as-keywords on both), but it would be interesting to see how usage is changing and such a study might 'allow us to design better interfaces to support these innovations'.

The comments to Tom's post are interesting. I particularly liked this from Matthew Morgan, 'The beauty of tagging is that folder tags and keyword tags can coexist in the same system. I think that's a big improvement over having folders in one place (the GUI) and keywords in another (the search box)', and this from Thomas Vander Wal, invoking his distinction between broad (eg, del.icio.us) and narrow (eg, Flickr) folksonomies:

Measuring Flickr's use of a tag is problematic unless the photos are of the exact same object. Flickr's narrow folksonomy ties the tags directly to the object so there is no way of interpreting meaning and popularity, nor change of tag usage over time for the same object.

Now, over at Many 2 Many: 'I think that keywords & tags need a context (folder) to make sense, e.g. del.icio.us tags live in the "/us/icio/del/" universe, while Flickr tags live in the "/com/flickr/" universe. Mixing them rarely makes sense.' (Michal Migurski); 'the stuff that Joshua has tried to do with del.icio.us is basically post-folder, but not quite keyword - it's a view of tags as a way in which something can belong to multiple folders without there being any cognitive dissonance. I think my point was that people were pulling that more towards a keyword style use though. One consequence of this might be that his interfaces aren't built for lots of tags, unlike the Flickr interface which conceals the less popular ones and lets recurrence form emergent patterns.' (Tom Coates).

It doesn't deal directly with Tom Coates' original questions about tagging, but David Gilbert's comments at Many 2 Many appealed to me, perhaps because I teach about literature and language and like Wittgenstein:

I would argue that, more or less, what we are now calling "folksonomies" are what the Greeks called "rhetoric." And if we begin to try to categorize or systematize all these usages, these manifold relations, tropes, figures, then we run into the same problem as Aristotle and later Cicero and the Romans, who never exhausted all of the categories needed to explain the various uses of language. Which leads me to conclude with a bad paraphrase of Wittgenstein: "The meaning of a tag is in its use." … You say, "rhetoric will never entirely be absent." I think you've got it the wrong way around. I'd say rather that the act of tagging is fundamentally rhetorical, and that "logic will never be entirely absent." Let's begin with a non-controversial function of tagging: It's a mnemonic device; I tag something in such a way so that I can recall it later, so that I can find it again. It may be that logical relations are useful in this regard, but mnemonics was historically a canon of rhetoric. … As to the social aspect of tagging (especially prominent in Flickr), the moment we begin to talk about how someone tags something for someone else, we are in the middle of issues of "audience." In other words, right in the middle of what has historically been the province of rhetoric. Logic, on the other hand, has always been indifferent to issues of audience, if not downright hostile towards them. … In his work titled The Rhetoric, Aristotle explains that what makes a rhetorical argument different from a logical one (in his terms, what makes an enthymeme different from a syllogism), is that the premises used in rhetorical arguments are drawn from phronesis--that is, from practical wisdom or common knowledge about the world that has been accumulated, not by the logician on his mountaintop or in his cave, but by the rabble in the assembly and in the agora; if you like, in the bazaar. David Gilbert