Alex Barnett's blog : Tagging

Moving my blog

alexbarn — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 21:38:00 GMT

OK, so I moved my new Alex Barnett blog to here for a number of reasons, explained here at my, er, new blog.

Tag, Tags, Tagging, Categorization, Classification and Laziness

alexbarn — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 05:37:00 GMT

Clearly a classic post on the topic of tagging, but I've not seen it before: A cognitive analysis of tagging (or how the lower cognitive cost of tagging makes it popular), by Rashmi Sinha:

"The rapid growth of tagging in the last year is testament to how easy and enjoyable people find the tagging process. The question is how to explain it at the cognitive level. In search for a cognitive explanation of tagging, I went back to my dusty cognitive psychology textbooks. This is what I learnt."

It's a good little read. Conclusion ('cause you're lazy):

"To conclude, 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."

As it happens 1,272 people, lazily it appears, already tagged this since Sept 2005.

Found via my del.icio.us/inbox, where I subscribe to the tag 'tagging'.

Note: the 1,272 taggers who thus far tagged this post have collectively agreed that 'tagging' is the best category for this post, not 'tag', nor 'tags', nor 'classification'.

analysis article blog brain classification cognition cognitive del.icio.us design folksonomies folksonomy metadata psychology research science social socialsoftware tag tagging tags taxonomy toread usability web web2.0

Also note: The tag 'categories' or any variation thereof is entirely missing from the posts tagcloud, even though the article (post) uses the word 'categories' and its variations are used 40 times in its text.

Also, also note: The word 'tag' and its variations are used 30 times, including twice in the title.

For other posts of mine ~~categorized~~ tagged 'tagging' (by me), ~~tag~~ click here (note dest.url ;-)

Update (a few minutes later): Quick manual collaborative algorithmic, artificial, artifical intelligence results:

Taglocity 1.0 for Outlook

alexbarn — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 02:29:00 GMT

I blogged about a tagging tool for Outlook 2003, Taglocity, when it went to beta earlier this year.

Well, the team has released Taglocity 1.0! Congratulations to David and his team.

It's cool. Check out Mike Gunderloy's review of the beta and a Taglocity demo screencast.

Enterprise tagging - off to the races...

alexbarn — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 04:35:00 GMT

TechCrunch outlines some of the features in a new product out there developed called ConnectBeam.

It was just matter of time before someone ran with the Tagging behind the firewall idea. From the page describing ConnetBeam's benefits:

Bookmark, retrieve, and reference information useful for day-to-day work
Feel at ease that your saved information is secure
Find “experts” on topics within your enterprise
Share information with fellow employees and partners in a trusted, and easy to use environment

The second point is referring to the topic discussed at the Seattle Mind Camp 2 (SMC2)session, Delicious Inside. Both hosted and self-hosted solutions were discussed as one being better than the other (corporate data security being the issue, rather than cost or complexity). It seems ConnectBeam are going to provide both.

I've signed up as beta tester to have a look at the UI / UX. Now, I'm going to state the obvious here: this is going to be one of many offerings that'll go to market over the next few weeks and months in this space that will involve social bookmarking inside the firewall.

The challenge companies wanting success by installng / renting / using this software won't be technical though. It will be the cultural challenges around adoption that will be the toughest to figure out.

As Dave Winer pointed out in the SMC 2 session, some companies and their employees will 'get it' and some won't. Success or failure with social applications like these will rely on programs of end-user education, showing the benefits of its use to the end-user (the Delcious Lesson as an example) . My guess is that there is some threshold that needs to be reached, a critical mass of users inside the organisation that 'get it', use it and get to some tipping point - after that, if you're not using it you're an out-of-the-loop employee. That's the theory, anyway. And that's where Dave and I disagreed. Sort of. I agree with his view that you can't force users, but you can create awareness, encouragement, etc. I think the benefits of success are worth the effort in trying at least.

Update: Postbubble also discusses the adoption challenges.

Coping with Information Overload (video)

alexbarn — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 17:19:00 GMT

About four weeks ago I made my way over to ZDNet's studios in San Francisco to be interviewed by Mike Elgan for DevSource and discuss a number of topics close to my heart. The video (15-ish mins) is now published.

Mike asked me about microformats, tagging, information overload, OPML, attention data and of course web 2.0. From the article introducing the interview:

"Are your users drowning in data, and you have no idea how to help them navigate through the information available? It doesn't help to know that you're the only one without a life preserver. Fortunately, the Web is evolving, and new tools are being created to help you — and the people you serve — navigate the expanding information space.

...In our latest DevSource video, Barnett shares his expertise on Web 2.0, OPML, tagging, data programmability, and microformats."

I tried to stay away from pure geek talk and instead talk about some of the benefits and the application of the various technologies we discussed. I touched on Dave Winer's Share Your OPML (see my post on it here), Greg Linden's Findory, the Del.icio.us bookmarking service, Josh Porter's 'the Del.icio.us lesson', and enterprise tagging.

Thanks to Mike Elgan for thinking of me and asking such well researched questions :-)

The interview is part of the DevSource video interview series. Other interviews worth checking out are with Rob Howard talking about the evolution of ASP.NET, Jakob Nielsen discussing usability, Jesse James Garrett (who coined the 'AJAX') on AJAX and the Jeremy Bailenson interview about virtual reality.

Tags: web 2.0, tagging, microformats, attention, opml, video, interview

Enterprise Tagging

alexbarn — Fri, 19 May 2006 08:13:00 GMT

Since posting the Del.icio.us Inside and Tagging behind-the-firewall posts, I've been pinged left right and center by a bunch of tagtastic people (both inside and outside Microsoft) regarding the topic of tagging within the enterprise / business context. I wanted to highlight for you two things I've seen recently that show where I think we're going with all this.

The first is a post by Waseem Sadiq, who works at Macaw in Holland. Waseem pinged me earlier today to let me know of a cool tagging behind-the-firewall case study he has written up over at his blog with an accompanying screencast.

"we actually have two different sets of applications. One that mimics the behaviour of del.icio.us and acts like a social bookmarking site (working on the same set of data), you can see a few screenshots of this application showing and posting bookmarks."

"Another application that we have built is what we call “Visor”, and is a much richer and dynamic application built on top of (what a coincidence) Microsoft’s WPF platform. This is the application I demo in the screencast"

In my view, del.icio.us-type application as a business server product is a total no-brainer in terms of its potential. I want one. The other app looks interesting, but until I play with it, I can't really give an opinion. The screencast helps, but I'm not really 'getting it'.

The other interesting find is Taglocity, an add-in application to Microsoft Outlook that provides a tagstatic interface into emails, calendar items, contacts and tasks.

"People send and receive a lot of email, and a significant part of people's time is in trying to manage their inbox, or find important information.

Using tags, through a simple user interface you already know, is more productive than many confusing inbox folders, complex rules or new applications to learn."

It's a powerful application and well worth a play. Taglocity is entering Beta 2, but I'm very impressed with Beta 1 - the application is already very feature-rich today. Check out a screencast that walks through the various scenarios. It has huge potential.

I'm getting very interested in this space - tagging inside and across businesses is going to get very big very quickly - and there is plenty of room for experimentation in this area. If there is anything you think I'd like to see in this context that you've developed or is in progress, just ping.

Update - just after I posted this, I caught Steve Eisner's post 'Cleaning up the tag-soup' - a nice read.

Tags: tags, tagging, folksonomies, web 2.0, socialsoftware, enterprise 2.0, Outlook, Microsoft

Attention Clouds

alexbarn — Thu, 04 May 2006 08:29:00 GMT

Here's an attention cloud for you.

az.

"The Intention Cloud is a web application supported by Perl and AJAX technologies that gathers and displays the queries performed on search engines by their users in an intuitive output using weighted lists, also known as tag clouds."

Tags: attention tags tagging

More on 'the Del.icio.us Lesson'

alexbarn — Wed, 03 May 2006 18:01:00 GMT

Joshua Porter, who coined the term 'the Del.icio.us Lesson', has gone to the trouble of further articulating the principle

What Joshua did by inventing the term is to encapsulate the root cause of tagging's success and and other social network effects.

I love it. Since his original post introducing the term I've been quoting it on a regular basis both in real-world conversation and on my blog.

In honour of the meme, here are my blog manifestations:

The Del.icio.us Lesson:

"Personal value>> Network effects>> Personal value"

Tagging behind the firewall:

"What's in it for the taggers? (the Del.icio.us Lesson)"

Corpus and the Anatomy of Words, Tags and Clusters

"a) tagging's primary use is for personal gain (bookmarking) with network benefits as a secondary (but very powerful) effect (the del.icio.us lesson)"

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Tags: tags tagging memes

47% of all blog posts are tagged

alexbarn — Mon, 01 May 2006 23:36:00 GMT

David Sifry provides more Technorati stats, this time with a little more info on the tagging front.

Turns out tagging is really kicking off. The number of posts with tags or categories has grown past 100 million mark since Technorati began tracking tags in January of 2005:

Nearly half (47%) of all blog posts have an author-generated category or set of tags associated with the post. For this analysis, Technorati excluded generic or default categories, like "General" or "Diary", which some services put into each post if the author doesn't specify a particular tag or category. We only counted posts that used a non-default tag or category."

and that each post tagged have:

"one or more tag or category associated with the post"

Tags: tags tagging tagtastic

Del.icio.us Inside

alexbarn — Sun, 30 Apr 2006 18:29:00 GMT

At Seattle Mind Camp yesterday, Michael Blay Michael Blay, Geoff Froh and I ran a session on the topic of behind-the-firewall tagging.

We kicked off by posing questions and letting a free flowing discussion kick off. It was great, lots of interest in the topic.

Dave Winer attended and described the session as a 'intense lightning-fast discussion'. However, he came to the early conclusion as part of that discssion that there was no conclusion - that is a waste of time to try and encourage employees to adopt a tagging culture to share knowledge inside corporate firewall. That users either get it or they don't. You can't force them.

I think Dave missed the point of the excercise. I wasn't there to try and figure out how Microsoft employees could start tagging internal resouces so I could subscribe to certain tag RSS feeds (although I would if I could), I was there to think through the challenges of that problem domain with smart geeks because the topc interests me. The discussion as nothing to do with my day job. In fact most of the people in the room were simply interested in the topic and aren't going to give it much thought the next day. That's the beauty of something like the Seattle Mind Camp - there doesn't have to be a 'why'.

I mean, why did this guy dress up yesterday like a ~~Microsoft employee~~ borg? Just for fun.

Anyway, later this morning Dave's doing an RSS and OPML session. I'll be there for sure. I'll even wear the t-shirt :-)

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Tags: tags, opml, MindCamp2.0

Tagging behind-the-firewall. Questions.

alexbarn — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 06:45:00 GMT

Stowe Boyd points (via David Weinberger) to a discussion regarding the potential of tagging within companies.

Tagging behind-the-firewall....

Questions -

Who would tag their content?
How (with what software) would they tag it?
What's in it for the taggers? (the del.icio.us lesson)?
What would the discovery solutions look like?
Is there a critical mass number of users to make internal, behind-the-firewall tagging successful?
And if so, what is that number?
And if there is a number, does that mean only companies with x number of employees can play tag?
Managed or organic taxonomies (or both)?

-

Tags: tags, tagging, folksonomies, web 2.0, socialsoftware

Tag-centric UI

alexbarn — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 20:08:00 GMT

Matt McAlister has put together his first screencast showing some of the various tag-centric navigation systems he's found of interest. The examples he uses are good pointers to some of the emerging IA trends we'll see incorporated into more and more sites and services.

Matt works at Yahoo's social media team, so if nothing else you'll get a sense of how one of the company's product managers is thinking about this space.

As an aside, I love the screencast format, especially those that aren't necessarily trying to pitch a product or service. It's a very effective way to communicate ideas and thoughts - a recorded audio / visual stream of conciousness.

Tags: tags, UI, navigation, webdesign, web, tech

The middleman won't go away

alexbarn — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 07:05:00 GMT

Via Findory's personalized page, I came across this, which led me to this, which then led me to this and this post by Matt Terenzio, speculating on the future disappearance of infomediaries:

"If I want to sell my bike, I expose a blog post with the classified ad or auction details and sit back and wait. No need to login to eBay, they’ll find it.

In the way that Blogging is making publishers out of everybody, RSS and Instant Messengers will make peer web services out of every possible item (pun intended) you can imagine."

The whole post is worth a read, but I'm pulling the snippet out as I respectfully disagree with his specific belief that 'infomediaries' will disappear and want to explain why I disagree.

I agree with Matt that the practice of login in and entering approximately the same information in multiple marketplaces is lame, for two reasons. One, the moment I log in and enter my data, my data has become the marketplace's data. That's lame. Two, doing this several times over to enter several marketplaces is not just lame, it's downright inefficient.

Edgeio is a good example of how this aspect of information distribution can become more efficient and convenient for the selling party, and how the data can remain the seller's data. As a seller, all you need to do in order that edgeio lists your product on its site is to post your listing content on a blog, or a site that outputs an RSS feed and include tags for that item. If other marketplaces also decide to go down this route, the seller's item can be also listed by these marketplaces using exactly the same means. So for the seller, they can publish once, run anywhere and maintain control of their data. In this context, edgeio is acting as an infomediary leveraging the distributed power of RSS and giving control back to the user. In this scenario, the act of the seller creating an feed RSS with an item to sell won't achieve a great deal unless something picks up the listing, and does something with it, like distribute it to potential buyers. So edgeio is acting as an infomediary.

What is meant by 'an infomediary'? This definition seems consistent with my understanding (and Matt's I assume?) of the word:

"An infomediary is an online resources that collates data from a variety of sources and acts as a middleman between those distributing the information and people who want the information."

To 'collate' and to 'distribute' are the two key verbs here. I'm trying to think how Matt as a seller could make an item he wanted to sell discoverable to a large number of prospective buyers without these two verbs being invoked somewhere along the process.

Here's the scenario Matt provides to show us how we can rid ourselves from these two verbs, 'collating' and 'distributing':

"Imagine this scnario.

“Where is that RSS 2.0 spec?”

. . . searching . . . found 2376 copies, would you like one?

“Yes, and bring me the twenty highest ranked Blogs that link to the spec and see if any of the authors are available to speak with.”

I know some of you are saying, “Big deal, you are describing a peer to peer world which may or may not happen for a great number of reasons.”

I say it is a big deal. It’s a peer world much richer than file-sharing or chat. It’s a world where everything that wants to be available is available, to anyone, at any time, with NO INTERMEDIARIES!"

So here's my question Matt - in line 3: "...searching...found 2376 copies, would you like one?" - what is the thing doing when searching and returning results?

Regardless of whether search was executed against content that was either physically hosted at the originating servers, or on a true peer to peer network, or a pre-built index, and regardless of how the actual search of the content was happening, the 'thing' doing the searching would collate the data it needed to present back to the user. If the user answered 'yes' to the question "would you like one?", it would need to render a copy of the data on screen, or in other words distribute the data.

In own Matt's scenario, the defining verbs of the word 'Infomediary' still require to occur, regardless of the architectural characteristics of the search solution (the middleman). Just because the process of 'infomediation' might move to the client (in the P2P scenario), or become a free service (e.g. not taking commission on a sale) it doesn't mean that act of collation and distribution will disappear. The middleman won't go away, he'll just move.

Tags: web, tech, search, infomediary, tags, RSS, Attention

Help with Tag Hell

alexbarn — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 09:37:00 GMT

James Corbett suggests Raw Sugar may help out with the Tag Hell I described a little while ago:

"Raw Sugar is already on the case and providing both hierarchical tag clusters and tag similarity detection."

I'm playing with now...

Tags: tags, tagging, folksonomies, tagdata, emergence, socialsoftware

Solving Tag-Hell

alexbarn — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 11:03:00 GMT

Backup Brain recently highlighted one of the problems with the tagosphere - the 'which tag do I use' problem.

I say 'one' of the problems, because there are at least three tagospheric problems that are creating a Tag-Hell:

1. When in content tagging mode which tag should I use for this post or photo? Example by Dori Smith:

Even though a proposed tag was advertised to the MSN Search Champs event attendees, chaos reigned anyhow - that's human nature and not an atypical scenario.

2. When in content search mode which tag should I use to search and find the content I mean to find? Example by Dori Smith:

"Nine different searches, nine different sets of results; but all of them are, at their heart, looking for the exact same thing. That's not working, by any meaning I know for the word."

3. Another tag search problem. If I'm looking for 'foo', I may be looking for 'foo'bar rather than kung'foo' (please - no correction comment: this was poor attempt at play on words that don't exist). Example:

The above tags are similar and they are different. But are they different enough to merit different tags, and are they similar enough to force consolidation? Yes and Affirmative I'd say. Do those who use the 'taxonomy' tag really mean something so different to those using tagsonomy, or folksomomy? Maybe.

Tag-Hell Solutions

So as a possible solution, do we all delegate some uber-semantic-taxonomiz(s)ation-folkosonimis(z)ation-committee-slash-group to solve it on our behalf? What would they call themselves, and would we agree to call the group by their chosen label? And if this elite assemblage of chosen ones could agree a common ontology, how would it be 'enforced'? Would it be used? How could their system let language evolve, let memetic forces do their thing and yet keep our tagging habits in order?

Given that the people who are actually interested in this stuff can't even agree, do we really expect them to solve the problem for us?

Or, do we continue the present course and make a few degrees course correction? If so, what could we do to solve these three tag issues?

The current tagosphere's course could be described as the 'order emerging from chaos' course - let the market decide, the market being us. It's the bottom-up approach. But as Dori has shown, we need help, clearly.

What's missing from the lists of tags above is the tagosphere's feedback and signals back to the user that can help the user decide which tags to use when tagging content and searching for tagged content.

Tag Data

There are three type of tag data than can act as signals that I'm calling: Aggregate Tag Counts, Related (or Relational) Tags and Social Tags. (I'm sure there are proper folksonomic terms for these but I don't know what they are).

Aggregate Tag Counts

tag (14,782)
tags (300)

ontology (3,567)
ontologies (124)

The numbers (that I've made up for illustration) represent the number of posts / items that have been tagged with each tag. If you saw this metadata and felt that the tags 'tag' and 'tags' meant the same thing (to you), I'd say you'd go with the flow. It's human nature - we like to fit in. So the feedback has a reinforcing effect.

In search mode, this feedback could also help locate where the majority of the content being searched or browsed for exists. Technorati used to provide this metadata as part of tag search results, but this feature has, alas, recently disappeared. Since I use Technorati to help me decide which tags to use I find this loss unhelpful - I feel I'm groping for the right tag to use in terms of critical mass use by others.

This lack of feedback can only make tagnoise worse.

Related (or Relational) Tags

Another feedback signal, more widely used by tag-aware systems, are related tags. I've explored this topic previously so I won't labour the point other than to say that -

Related tags should be:

bi-directional
be represented by their relative strength to other tags
and be surfaced to the user in tagging and search modes.

In Del.icio.us the same tags 'software' and 'programming' are mostly bi-directional and have relationships to other tags but their relative strengths are not represented.

Social Tags

It might help to leverage the social dimension of tags. An idea proposed by Scott Koon (aka Lazycoder) is that you could use your social circle or reading list / OPML file to navigate tagged content, so that in your aggregator / feedreader / tagware you can either locate content tagged with tags that you've pre-defined, or browse a tagloud scoped to your OPML field / friends list.

It's nice idea and plays squarely in the Attention space.

Let's take it further - could we use the tags used by your reading list / OPML cloud to help decide which tags to use when tagging or searching content. The premise is that if I find you interesting, then I'm likely to find the tags you find interesting, so if I have a choice between 'folksonomy 'and 'tagsonomy' I might choose the former because you use it. In terms of solving Tag-Hell, I'm not sure if this would be as helpful as the other two types of tag data described earlier, Aggregate Tag Counts and Related (or Relational) Tag, but there maybe something in it. Who knows? (....and if your read this far, you might well be thinking, who cares?).

Tagspace Browsers

Quick note on these: Tagspace browsers are nice and fun tag discovery tools but really don't help me decide which tags to use, nor find content.

At last, the last sentence of this post

What I'd really like to see are the Aggregate Tag Counts and Related Tags data surfaced by all tag-aware systems.

Actually, the following is the last sentence of this post, sorry

If these aids became standard UI features tag-aware systems (they do exist in some) we could emerge ourselves out of Tag-Hell.

Tags: tags, tagging, folksonomies, OPML, Attention, tagdata, emergence, socialsoftware Web2.0