Was searching for something else, but found this – del.icio.us tagrolls. So, an overview of my bookmarks

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/06/28.html#a1789; comments are here.

• Age of transparency: live your life well aware that everything counts
• Weblog as a backstage: performance is counterproductive
• Converging metadata and emerging ontologies

I shouldn’t be quoting that much, but I guess you can forgive someone with a trojan flu for lack of summarisation :)

Martin Dugage:

In a great post, Metadata for the masses (via Many-to-Many), Peter Merholz advocates free tagging of documents as opposed to choosing tags from inflexible top-down classification systems, which often force users to view the world in potentially unfamiliar ways. I tend to agree with that from my experience of taxonomies, which often become obsolete within two years. Then Peter writes about the limitations of free tagging:

Clearly, such tagging systems are not a panacea; they present many potential drawbacks. With no one controlling the vocabulary, users develop multiple terms for identical concepts. For example, if you want to find all references to New York City on Del.icio.us, you’ll have to look through “nyc,” “newyork,” and “newyorkcity.”

That’s were ontologies come in handy. They give a community of people the ability to develop a common meta-classification model that sits on top of existing ones and bridges them together. An ontology can define “nyc”, “newyork” and “newyorkcity” as synonyms, define “Time Square” as included in “nyc” etc. See for example Arisem, who are doing a good job there. In a sense, ontologies allow communities to build a common language from the ground up, which is essential in knowledge creating environment. Top-down norms can be introduced later, when language can be “industrialized” for larger communities.

I have mixed feelings about ontologies… From one side, they could be really useful. Next to connecting metadata from different people or communities ontologies could be used to connect data from different systems (e.g. your weblog and del.icio.us tags). And, of course, one could imagine all kinds of great things with inference rules (always wonder if I picked up the right meaning of the term from my colleagues ;).

From another side, ontology development could be complex and costly, so I’m always wondering if it’s worth it.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t think of ways to support converging metadata and emerging ontologies.

Converging metadata could be a result of social pressure.

It can be done as in k-collector where people can select from the list of existing topics (their own and others) or add their own. Or as in nutr.itio.us by choosing del.icio.us tags of others for a link you are about to add.

This approach can help cases like nyc/newyork/newyorkcity, where we deal with different ways of writing the same tag. For example, after finding out that majority of del.icio.us users used visualization and not visualisation I changed s into z in my own tags.

Next to it we can think of emergent ontologies.

Ages ago Liz Lawley described how relations you can do it with del.icio.us:

Add a site to your del.icio.us bookmarks, and then look to see who else has added it. What descriptive tags did they use for it? As an example, here are the current links to Metacrap in the del.icio.us system. I used the terms metadata and semweb. Other terms used include taxonomy, ontology, ia, humanFactor, and xml.

Funny enough, del.icio.us does it now automatically, but you can see it only for some posts, so I was surprised by the discovery.

So, check my links on aggregation, middle column, lower part – it shows other users who bookmarked same links and tags they used (rss, tool_rss, feed, meta, syndication, atom).

Of course, you need a critical mass of tagged links to do it and, of course, quality varies, but just think how much you can do with something like this. For example:

• have “raw” ontologies that could be good enough for some purposes and reworked manually for those where more precision is needed
• do “translations” of tags (e.g. my ‘aggregation’ is your ‘rss’)
• find like-minded people
• find areas of agreement (shared language/tagging) and disagreement (totally different tags) in a community

Side note: as an alternative to folksonomies, from Peter Merholz

Ethnoclassification, to the best of my knowledge, was coined by Susan Leigh Star for her Digital Libraries conference workshop “Slouching Toward Infrastructure.”

See also:

• Classifications for archiving, search and retrieval
• Distributed KM
• and other stuff under knowledge mapping or ontologies

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/10/26.html#a1401; comments are here.

• Topics and terms (categorisations and text analysis) for weblog conversations
• LMS and knowledge mapping
• Google: selling your soul in pieces?

Tom Coates on tag-based bookmarks in browsers (via Brian Dennis) – applying del.icio.us tag-bookmarking model to a browser:

To summarise the problems with current bookmarking systems then, we could say that (1) the process is slow and annoying (2) that it requires us to continually refine and redevelop our taxonomies if we’re going to keep track of everything, (3) that URLs can belong in a number of bins and that (4) we can be left with unmanageably large lists. An ideal system would therefore speed the process up of both bookmarking a site and retrieving it later. An ideal system would try to alleviate the problems of categorisation and would work as an a priori assumption that a URL might wish to be stored in multiple bins. An ideal system would not display all the links by default. An ideal system would, in fact, use tags…

Tom provides a whole scenario and mock-ups of tag-based bookmarks in a browsers… What I’d add is that we need to think broader than easy classification, bookmarking and finding. The study I blogged almost a year ago (Keeping found things found on the web) suggest that when deciding what to do with interesting web-pages people may think about:

• Portability – being able to take it with you
• Number of access points – being able to access information from different locations
• Preservation of information in its current state
• Currency of information – having updated version of information
• Context - remembering why it was saved
• Reminding – remembering that something has to be done with it
• Ease of integration into existing structures (e.g. e-mail with link can be easily archived with other e-mails, while bookmarks have their own structure)
• Communication and information sharing
• Ease of maintenance

From this perspective del.icio.us would be more powerful than tagged bookmarks in a browser :)

And, have no idea how I missed folksonomy as a new term for it :)

See also (re: more things to do with tags): LiveTopics wishlist or topic-based blogging support

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/10/18.html#a1392; comments are here.

• Folksonomies: bits of research and visual browsing
• Escaping categories
• Experimenting with creating an ontology based on weblog content

One of the directions that keep on popping up when I’m thinking about blogging in KM context is topic-based blogging. There are a couple of reasons behind it:

• personal - if blogs are used as a personal knowledge management tool than ability to tag posts is important to be able to organise, retrieve and share them
• corporate – once weblogs are used in a company one would want to be able to slice an aggregated stream of posts into topic-based streams to support knowledge sharing

liveTopics and k-collector are good examples of personal vs. corporate implementations (see also: liveTopics and k-collector compared) and del.icio.us is an example of connecting personal and shared views on topics together.

In this post I’d like to focus on personal side and describe what topic-based blogging functionalities one may want as a blogger. And because I’m very practical and selfish I’d describe it as my liveTopics wishlist :)

What liveTopics do now

• allow adding topics for every weblog posts – e.g. check this post via browser
• display a list of posts per topic – e.g. my posts about liveTopics
• display topics as a frequency list or recently updated list – e.g. my topic index
• provide an interface for managing topics (renaming/deleting + backup + some settings)

My liveTopics wishlist

• Printing
  • I’d like to be able to print posts for a topic or combination of topics (so far I can think of AND/OR combinations, but may be I’d want more once related topics are there ;)
• Aggregation
  • Topics indication in my RSS feed (e.g. in ENT format)
  • RSS feed for each topic (ideally for a combination of topics as well :)
• Related topics
  • Indication of a relation (below are different overlapping! dimentions)
    • Automatic vs. manual
      • Automatic: based on co-occurences in the same post – e.g. related tags for innovation at k-collector or del.icio.us
      • Manual: added by me to indicate how topics are related in my head – e.g. I’d like to be able to specify that blog communities is a narrower than communities, but also related to blog ecosystem
    • Internal vs. external
      • Showing that my posts on blog communities are related to my del.icio.us link collection on blogCommunities
    • Me vs. others
      • Showing that my posts on innovation are related to post on innovation at k-collector
  • Inference
    • Once relations are there one can do all nice things with inference rules.
      • For example automatically including narrower topics when broader topics are selected, e.g. when someone selects communities posts on blog communities are shown as well even if they are not explicitly marked that way
• Visualising
  • Dynamics
    • I’d love to see how my use of topics changes over time; something similar to temporal rhythms of interactions with others visualised from email arhives
  • Relations between topics
    • Just a nice image :) Something like delicious mind
• Small liveTopics/Radio specific things
  • Shortcuts for topics added automatically
  • Expanding of posts by topic in topic index pages

Of course, I wonder how many of those things are “nice to have”/”Lilia specific” and which features would be used by many blogger, but this is a “further research direction” as I’d write in a paper :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/10/13.html#a1384; comments are here.

• Converging metadata and emerging ontologies
• WBC04: day 2 morning
• What happens once you see patterns in the mess of traces you and others leave?