David introduces a new feature at Librarything:
“tagmashes,” which are (in essence) searches on two or more tags. So, you could ask to see all the books tagged “france” and “wwii.” But the fact that you’re asking for that particular conjunction of tags indicates that those tags go together, at least in your mind and at [...]
The slightly oxymoronic Britannica Blog has recently hosted a series of posts on Web 2.0, together with responses from Clay Shirky, Andrew Keen and others. The debate’s been of very variable quality, on both the pro- and the anti- side; reading through it is a frustrating experience, not least because there’s some interesting stuff in [...]
Stephen Lewis (via Dave) has a good and troubling post about the limits of the Web as a repository of knowledge.
while the web might theoretically have the potential of providing more shelf space than all libraries combined, in reality it is quite far from being as well stocked. Indeed, only a small portion of the [...]
Alex points to this piece by Rashmi Sinha on ‘Findability with tags’: the vexed question of using tags to find the material that you’ve tagged, rather than as an elaborate way of building a mind-map.
I should stress, parenthetically, that that last bit wasn’t meant as a putdown – it actually describes my own use of [...]
Nick writes, provocatively as ever, about the recent ‘community-oriented’ redesign of the netscape.com portal:
A few days ago, Netscape turned its traditional portal home page into a knockoff of the popular geek news site Digg. Like Digg, Netscape is now a “news aggregator” that allows users to vote on which stories they think are interesting or [...]
I hate to say this – I’ve always loathed VR boosters and been highly sceptical about the people they boost – but Jaron Lanier’s a bright bloke. His essay Digital Maoism doesn’t quite live up to the title, but it’s well worth reading (thanks, Thomas).
I don’t think he quite gets to the heart of the [...]
Nick Carr’s hyperbolically-titled The Death of Wikipedia has received a couple of endorsements and some fairly vigorous disagreement, unsurprisingly. I think it’s as much a question of tone as anything else. When Nick reads the line
certain pages with a history of vandalism and other problems may be semi-protected on a pre-emptive, continuous basis.
it clearly sets [...]
At Many-to-Many, Ross Mayfield reports that Clay Shirky and danah boyd have been thinking about “the lingering questions in our field”, viz. the field of social software. I was a bit surprised to see that
How can communities support veterans going off topic together and newcomers seeking topical information and connections?
still qualifies as a ‘lingering question’; [...]
By way of background to this post – and because I think it’s quite interesting in itself – here’s a short paper I gave last year at this conference (great company, shame about the catering). It was co-written with my colleagues Judith Aldridge and Karen Clarke. I don’t stand by everything in it – as [...]
Et la piscine de la rue des Fillettes. Et le commissariat de police de la rue du Rendez-Vous. La clinique médico-chirurgicale et le bureau de placement gratuit du quai des Orfèvres. Les fleurs artificielles de la rue du Soleil. L’hôtel des Caves du Château, le bar de l’Océan et le café du Va et Vient. [...]
Here’s a problem I ran into, halfway through building my first ontology, and some thoughts on what the solution might be.
Question 47 of the Mixmag survey reads:
Have you ever had an instance[sic] where your drug use caused you to:
Get arrested?
Lose a job?
Fail an exam?
Crash a car/bike?
Be kicked out of a club?
What this tells us is [...]
This one’s about work.
I’m currently documenting the concepts underlying the 2005 Mixmag Drug Survey using Protege. Here’s why:
The documentation of social science datasets on a conceptual level, so as to make multiple datasets comprehensible within a shared conceptual framework, is inherently problematic: the concepts on which the data of the social sciences are constructed are [...]
I nearly installed Hyperwords this morning; the only reason I didn’t is that I haven’t moved to Firefox 1.5 yet (and don’t intend to until I’m confident it won’t break any of the extensions I’m already using). And, in principle, it looks great:
With the Hyperwords Firefox Extension installed just select any text and a menu [...]
15 February 2006 – 4:24 pm
Technorati’s new “Filter by Authority” feature depresses me intensely – not least because I thought they’d abandoned the word ‘authority’ some time after my last rant on the subject. There are three problems here. Firstly, as I wrote last year:
Technorati is all about in-groups and out-groups. … authority directly tracks popularity – although this is [...]
8 February 2006 – 4:44 pm
Suw Charman types too fast. She’s produced what looks like a fascinating record of the Future of Web Apps conference, but I can’t see myself ever reading the whole thing. But this jumped out at me (slight edits):
Joshua Schachter – The things we’ve learned
Tagging is not really about classification or organisation, it’s user interface. It’s [...]
7 February 2006 – 9:27 pm
Peter Campbell writes in the current LRB:
Inanimate things in museums – teacups from which no one drinks, pictures which will never again be bought and sold – can, as much as stuffed animals, make one think sadly of the time when they were alive. Modern curators know this and spend much time and money avoiding [...]
6 February 2006 – 12:48 pm
Tom comments on this post from last year:
Thoughts: (1) Pledgebank is about increasing the perceived effect of ones actions by connecting it to a larger purpose (2) Wikipedia already seems to have that mechanism but (3) I like the idea of building social processes alongside wikipedia a lot…
Yes and No to point 2. Wikipedia already [...]
2 February 2006 – 3:40 pm
David cites an empirical analysis of social network evolution in a large university community, based on a registry of e-mail interactions between more than 43,000 students, faculty, and staff. (“Hey, gang, let’s do the research right here!”)
The results show that at least in this particular environment, people were more likely to form ties with others [...]
30 January 2006 – 11:25 am
So, I’m a researcher. (At least until the money runs out next year; hopefully I’ll have something similar lined up by then.) Before I was a researcher I was a freelance journalist for about six years, while I did my doctorate; before that I was a full-time journalist for three years; and before that I [...]
3 November 2005 – 10:05 am
Thomas criticises Wikipedia’s entry on folksonomy – a term which was coined just over a year ago by, er, Thomas. As of today’s date, the many hands of Wikipedia say:
Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to [...]
