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.

• MILK: multimedia interactions for learning and knowing
• Most common words of BlogWalk participants
• Personal visualisations of e-mail archives

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.

• NOAGGREGATE: what if I don’t want my digital bits to be connected at one place?
• Styling weblog quotes
• Learning webs

I’m using del.icio.us for a few weeks now, but there are some changes in my bookmarking habits already:

• I add post to del.icio.us bookmarklet to all computers I use (including adding and then deleting it at Internet cafes!)
• I stopped sending e-mails to myself with links!!!
• I have less “just a link” weblog posts.
• I do not keep many things in my news aggregator just to decide what should I read them, send e-mail to myself or write “just a link” weblog post :)

I definitely like an opportunity to assign tags that emerging with my thinking. For me it works the same way for accessing my bookmarks as liveTopics for accessing my weblog, but with one important difference: it allows both my own and a community views on bookmarks and tags describing them. This is something that could be done by combining functionalities of liveTopics and k-collector in a way that allows switching between personal and community views on weblog content.

I do not know if del.icio.us will scale in time for me. Also I would love to have a better integration of it with my weblog. I’m thinking of using Radio‘s multiAuthorWeblogTool to get links posted to my weblog automatically via my del.icio.us RSS feed. This will make them searchable with the rest of my weblog, but still leaves the problem of integrating two sets of topics (liveTopics for weblog posts and del.icio.us tags for bookmarks).

I still hope to find time to write on linkblogs, so this reflection may be a first step…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/01/17.html#a901; comments are here.

• On personal preferences that shape research
• Refactoring in the backstage
• Topics and terms (categorisations and text analysis) for weblog conversations

Matt Mover and Paolo Valdemarin announce the launch of K-Collector 1.0. Congratulations and good luck!

It was fascinating to see how it all developed – from the seed of idea into a fully-grown product. I had (and still have ;) my concerns about it, but anyway it’s nice to see how many insights on how people work with knowledge went into it (some of it is in a story on KM and weblogs explained in vectors).

Now I’m curious to see several things:

• how k-collector weblogging works
• price tag
• implementation case-studies (I can volunteer to do one :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/11/24.html#a851; comments are here.

• What would be a good way to find all (blog) pages linking to a specific blog post?
• Topic-based RSS feeds from K-Collector
• How do I search my weblog?

A follow-up thinking for my previous post: I wonder if aggregation kills personal voices.

Think of a simple scenario. You start blogging, you find several blogs you like, you discover news aggregator and start reading these blogs regularly. It creates a sense of connection with the authors of these weblogs, sense of knowing them. It creates a context for interpreting posts.

Then upscaling comes: you have hundreds of weblogs and no time to read everything. You scan for interesting titles and jump back and forth. It’s convenient, but your pay less attention to any specific weblog and you don’t get to know its writer well.

I wonder if it’s true. What if once I have more than X weblogs in my news aggregator they become content, news bits and not personal voices any more?

This brings me to another question. We say that weblogs provide a context to interpret ideas (btw, this is one of “weblog selling points” for knowledge management). What exactly provides this context: informal writing style, ability to see other posts, regular reading or something else?

For me much of the context is provided by regular reading. It creates a sense of knowing a blogger and makes connecting with his or her ideas easier. But the problem is that regular reading doesn’t scale: news readers make it easier than browsing, but after a certain number of weblogs they don’t help (and I guess magic number 150 has something to do with it). If upscaling weblog audience turns it into broadcasting (discussion overview), may be upscaling number of weblogs you read turns them from voices into content?

This is also one more point for weblogs in business: tools vs. voices dilemma. More practically speaking, if a company-wide weblog aggregation (think of k-collector :) will turn weblogs into a smart content management system?

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/11/02.html#a821; comments are here.

• Macromedia blogging
• ‘Don’t blog on Fridays’: collisions between blogging and work – HUMlab talk
• Blogs to support community

K-Collector provides RSS feed for aggregated topics. I loved the idea, went to subscribe to Knowledge Management and knowledge work, but was dissapointed to find there mainly weblogs I read anyway :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/10/14.html#a798; comments are here.

• How Technorati works? (2)
• BlogTalk paper: weblogging tools
• Waypath plug-in installed

I put it here, because this is not the first time I’m collecting links explaining k-collector in one e-mail :)

• k-collector at work
• Intranet aggregator, a model that explains the idea
• Recap: ENT, k-collector and WWWW, more complicated explanation

Once I started to write about k-collector, I’ll ask a question I have in my mind for some time… I’m thinking about possible uses of k-collector in companies and about motivation of bloggers to use it. I believe that the idea is great, but as a potential user I’m not motivated to use k-collector because:

I’m a liveTopics user. I use liveTopics because this tool provides me with a way to structure and access my own ideas. K-collector doesn’t (see also earlier post on liveTopics vs. k-collector).

K-collector provides a topic-based overview of different weblog posts. Fine, but Waypath does it better, indexing all blogs and not only small fracture that uses k-collector. So, why should I narrow it down?

To use k-collector before it gets smarter I have to add topics to my posts. I can’t use them to navigate my own weblog, so the only motivation is to make navigation between all weblogs easier. Nice and altruistic, may work for me, but my experience is that it doesn’t work for most people (e.g. people tend not to add keywords to documents in a corporate document repository even if it makes their own documents more accessible).

• And I’m also not sure how smart k-collector will become to suggest right topics. In many cases I use topic that says something about pattern behind a post and doesn’t have visible connection in the text. For example, the “suggest” button liveTopics does not suggest “technology adoption” topic unless I mention it explicitly.

At the end my main point is simple: I believe k-collector has more chances to be used if it offers more to endusers. Personally I’d like to have an opportunity to switch between “all weblogs” and “my own weblog” views :)

Update: Paolo and Matt answered some of my questions by demonstrating and explaining “to be released soon” k-collector version. The system is not perfect yet, but I like their future-customer-friendly way of working :)

And I missed one link – K-collector update: topic matching

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/09/30.html#a773; comments are here.

• Weblog research ethics (2)
• How do I search my weblog?
• Link

Matt Mover in k-collector recap:

Introducing WWWW. In the last weeks I’ve been posting here and there about topics, aggregators, K-collector and other assorted stuff. Maybe it’s the case to recap and try to explain a little bit better what we are up to. Here we go [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

Paolo gives a good account of what k-collector is all about.

It’s Ross Mayfield who said “I took the orange pill“, I just loved the methaphor (I went to see The matrix reloaded yesterday :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/05/19.html#a596; comments are here.

• BlogTalk 2.0: Panel 4 – blog adoption and blog communities
• Converging metadata and emerging ontologies
• There will be no BlogTalk 3.0