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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
13 February 2006 – 11:21 am
I don’t trust Yahoo!, for reasons which have nothing to do with my dislike of misused punctuation marks (although the bang certainly doesn’t help); I don’t trust Google either. Maybe it’s because I’m old enough to remember when MicroSoft [sic] were new and exciting and a major attractor of geek goodwill; maybe it’s just because [...]
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 [...]
14 December 2005 – 12:43 pm
I’ve! just! exported! my! bookmarks! and! deleted! my! account!.
- Sophie, in comments at Burningbird
If this keeps up all the “Web 2.0″ blog nerds will be working at Yahoo! by next month.
- Jake
Yup! I think that’s the plan!
- Tom
(comments at plasticbag.org)
delicious was not only a community. It was also an experiment. A place for us geeks [...]
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 [...]
Dave:
I no longer look at the front page of the NY Times to tell me what’s important. I look at it to see what people like the editors of the NY Times think is important. I’m finding the news that matters through the Internet recommendation engine: Blogs, emails, mailing lists, my aggregator, websites that aggregate [...]
29 September 2005 – 10:05 am
Back here, I wrote:
Tagging, I’m suggesting, isn’t there to tell us about stuff: it’s there to tell us about what people say about stuff. As such, it performs rather poorly when you’re asking “where is X?” or “what is X?”, and it comes into its own when you’re asking “what are people saying about X?”
This [...]
26 September 2005 – 12:03 pm
Several months ago, I wrote (regarding the Wikipedia page on ‘anomie‘):
For what I’d want to know about a concept like that, that page is pretty dreadful. It veers wildly between essentialism (there is a thing called ‘anomie’ and we know what it is, across time and space) and nominalism (different people have used this combination [...]
22 September 2005 – 12:42 pm
Or: what ethnoclassification is, and what folksonomy isn’t.
When it comes to tagging, I’m facing both ways. I think it’s fascinating and powerful and new – qualitatively new, that is: it’s worth writing about not just because it’s shiny, but because there’s still work to be done on understanding it. At the same time, I think [...]
20 September 2005 – 1:05 pm
This is a fascinating post (in Italian) by Pietro Speroni on the relationship between authority, communities and markets. This is an interesting and controversial area; the fact that Pietro also invokes the Long Tail (which, as you’ll recall, is not what it seems) makes it all the more compelling (to me at least).
I’ll translate as [...]
Why I use ‘ethnoclassification’ rather than ‘folksonomy’.
‘Ethnoclassification’ recalls ‘ethnomethodology’, Harold Garfinkel’s coinage for the study of the collective construction of everyday life. Garfinkel took a great deal from Alfred Schutz; I think some of his work develops Schutz’s social phenomenology in the wrong direction, but to have Schutz’s work developed at all is a good [...]
Thanks to a couple of links posted by Thomas, I’ve just read Bryan Boyer’s Correspondance Romano (Corriere Romano, surely? never mind) closely followed by this post from February by Tom Evslin. Tom:
People don’t think hierarchically – at least most people don’t. We think in terms of associations. Our dreams give this away as they hyperlink [...]
Tom Coates’ interesting post Two cultures of fauxonomies collide has been getting a lot of attention lately, mainly thanks to Dave. There’s a particularly interesting discussion running at Many-to-Many. The discussion has progressed quite rapidly, with several bright and articulate people pitching in to illustrate how Tom’s original insight can be developed. My [...]
David Gratton (found via Thomas) argues that all communities are communities of interest. He argues – I think correctly – that what appear to be, for example, professional, demographic or geographic ‘communities’ are created and maintained through shared interests and shared activity around those interests. Where those interests and that activity are lacking, what’s [...]
