Swamped
Tuesday, February 1, 2005, 10:29 PM - Tech
Poor stolenchildhoods.org. It's one thing to be slashdotted. It's another to have Aaron Brown plaster your url across News Night. Call it being CNNed.Solar
Monday, January 10, 2005, 11:32 AM - Tech
This one from Technology Trends is both fascinating and optomistic. Researchers at the University of Toronto have developed nano-crystals that promise to capture 5 times more solor energy that the best current solar cells.More Folksonomy
Tuesday, January 4, 2005, 04:47 PM - Tech
A strong article by Andrew Mathes on folksonomies.1. He makes the distinction between a categorization system and a classification system. The flat space of a folksonomy is a category system. The formal hierarchy of a taxonomy is a classification system.
2. He points out, as I did earlier, that a folksonomy can be the beginning point for the creation of a formal taxonomy. I'd extend this by saying that if the universe of users is controlled, say by profession, then the utility of the folksonomy as a collection of terms improves.
3. He references the strengths and weaknesses of system creators, be they administrators, creators, or users. One clear strength of folksonomy is that the meta-tagging is based on how terms are referenced by users.
4. Group folksonomies, such as del.icio.us, add a component of communication that enhances the creation of the meta-data:
This tight feedback loop leads to a form of asymmetrical communication between users through metadata. The users of a system are negotiating the meaning of the terms in the folksonomy, whether purposefully or not, through their individual choices of tags to describe documents for themselves.5. The barriers to entry are much lower with a folksonomy system, such as del.icio.us, than a formalized taxonomy system, because the user is creating the terms and is not forced to learn a system of terms first.
6. Based on Andrew's discussion, I conclude that there's an important difference between the definition of a word and the definition of a term. A word is used to describe something in particular. A term is defined by the objects it is used to categorize:
Examining all photos in Flickr tagged with "iraq" includes photographs (of)Iraq, US troops in Iraq, as well as photographs of war protests. Although this may not be a community, what we are seeing is a group of people helping to define a term with their photographs and metadata.7. An interesting direction:
I hypothesize that it follows a power law scenario. That is, the most used tags are more likely to be used by other users since they are more likely to be seen, and thus there will be a few tags that are used by a substantial number of users, then an order of magnitude more tags that are used by fewer users, and another order of magnitude more used by only a handful of users. Examining this sort of distribution of tag use could give a better indication of whether a folksonomy converges on terms and foster consensus, or if as the user based grows the vocabulary grows at a more even rate, and the distribution of terms flattens, perhaps indicating less agreement.8. Another interesting direction:
The use of a folksonomy to supplement existing classification schemes and provide additional access to materials by encouraging and leveraging explicit user metadata contributions is a possible area for research and further development in information retrieval systems. If information retrieval systems begin to incorporate user-centered information management tools, the organizational schemes developed by the users have the possibility to be of great interest to other users and improve the systems.I wonder if it is workable for del.icio.us to include two tag fields - one for tagging the article, and a second for tagging the tags. This could be the beginning of a classification system.
Personalization
Tuesday, December 28, 2004, 02:57 PM - Tech
Just reading Chris Anderson's article The Long Tail (from Jon Udell). He ends with a comment:This is the difference between push and pull, between broadcast and personalized taste. Long Tail business can treat consumers as individuals, offering mass customization as an alternative to mass-market fare.I've never been a real fan of "personalized" sites because most of them that I've visited or heard discussed use personalization to restrict content. Your past habits are used to present current content. You looked at these news articles in the past, so here's some more of the same. What I don't like is presumption that the loss of serendipity and the blinders placed on my exploration of content is beneficial to me.
The personalization Anderson refers to, such as that at Amazon, is based on comparing my selections with selections made by the group and providing feedback from the group. Rather than constricting content, this type of personalization removes blinders by showing pathways to break habits. That's a beneficial service - call it guided serendipity.
It's similar to the folksonomy aspect of del.icio.us. The big difference, of course, is that while Amazon drives the selection algorithm, the selection process on del.icio.us is driven by the tags each user chooses to use.
Web services
Thursday, November 25, 2004, 02:38 PM - Tech
I'm reading through this article discussing SOAP vs. REST by Paul Prescod.I've always been uncomfortable with the SOAP implementation of web services without really knowing why. It has always struck me as being something that is unnecessarily complex for the project at hand.
It seems my intuition is both right and wrong. Prescod makes the point that SOAP is easier to use than web protocols for the purpose of integrating legacy applications because it was designed that way.
The problem, as Prescod defines it, is that SOAP implementation treats the web as nothing more than a transport carrier rather than as a robust, interconnected information space.
It always holds out the hope that you can keep using your legacy protocols, keep using your legacy addressing models and just generate a web service wrapper for them. Consequently, SOAP takes a point of view that it provides mechanisms for communicating between computers, not policies about how to do so.I guess it was this "moving target" process that is what made SOAP seem overly complex. It reminds me of those application vendors who tell you their system can do anything you want it to (if you spend enough money to let them customize it).
At every point where there has been controversy about the applicability of the SOAP specification to a new problem domain, SOAP has grown. It has never risked telling people that they must figure out how to map their problem onto the existing rules or perhaps even choose a different protocol. "Keep your current diet, maintain your current exercise schedule - but we'll help you lose five pounds per week."
Folksonomy => Taxonomy
Thursday, November 11, 2004, 12:46 PM - Tech
After mulling over the research from yesterday, I've some thoughts.1. A folksonomy is not a taxonomy, it is a flat classification system while a taxonomy is a highly structured hierarchy of terms and their interrelations. To compare the two directly is incorrect.
2. A folksonomy can stand on its own, or it can be the collection of terms as the basis for a taxonomy.
3. As Warner points out, a thesarus is the intermediate step between a classification and a taxonomy. In my experience, the difference between a classification and a thesarus is that the user provides the synonyms in a classification and the infoworker makes them explicit in the thesarus.
4. I'm struck by the passion of Clay and Cory both in favor of folksonomy and against taxonomy. I understand their support of the first, being social software mavens and all. I don't understand their venom for the latter.
Folksonomies
Wednesday, November 10, 2004, 03:27 PM - Tech
Some links on the topic of folksonomy:Ideas Bazaar: emic and eticFor a term that is only a couple of months old, it's hot -- over 9,000 hits on google
Many2Many: Clay Shirky: canonical and a priori vs. contextual and a prosteriori
peterme.com: Peter Merholz
peer pressure
Designweenie: James Spahr: managing classification terms for portfolios
headshift: One thing's for sure: social tagging is a revelation for anybody who has sat through days of agonising taxonomy design with client organisations who are unsure of their users' real needs.
Infoworld: Jon Udell: abandon the taxonomy
alex wright: semanitic web: Fast at the bottom, slow at the top
Cory Doctorow: Metacrap: 7 reasons why not
geodog: they turn out to be great ways of following a conversation on the web. I display the RSS feed for my Del.icio.us subscriptions and it updates hourly with what other people have bookmarked about topics that interest me
Net result: information architecture is a bitch, especially computer-mediated information gathering. Flat classification schemes are valuable but depend on human pattern matching to work. Hierarchical taxonomies are valuable because they are (hopefully) unambiguous but are inflexible. Obvious take-away: there's need for both. But how and when?
More here: Amy Warner on controlled vocabularies in general.
social webbing
Tuesday, November 9, 2004, 04:11 PM - Tech
I've been looking at del.icio.us again, prompted by this post at Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends blog.del.icio.us is a "social bookmarks manager", a "free social software web service for sharing web bookmarks". People enter their bookmarks and add tags, or keywords, for each bookmark. Then they can see their own list from any internet machine. The social part is that you can also see the bookmarks which other people have entered using the same tags.
At first blush, the neatest function of del.icio.us is the bottoms-up creation of a "folkonomy" of web content in contrast to a top-down "taxonomy". The categorization is done by those that read and need the meaning of the content and not imposed preconceptions of those who create the content.
But it only goes so far. There's the issue of the power law effect, where the a-list content creators dominate, to consider. There's also the issue of the proper role of expertise organizing what can become recursive grass-roots babble.
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