Say what you will about evil-empire death merchants Raytheon - it turns out they
are a great example of corporate web taggers! David Weinberger points today to
a fascinating wiki for the Taxonomy Community of Practice where there's a great article about Raytheon's practice of letting employees submit URLs with tags that company
librarians quickly vet with an easy hand and then add to search results. They love it! Company librarian
explains after the jump.
The social web as the new intranet?
Jon Udell is one of my favorites and in this week's print edition of InfoWorld magazine his column really raises some
fundamental issues. The article was available a week ago online but just now caught my eye and is titled Reinventing the Intranet: Modern social software could be the key to building effective enterprise knowledge
systems. Anyone who's been reading much of Udell's writing will be unsurprised
by the basic premise of this piece, but the sense of historical perspective and the succinct questions the article
raises about translating what are so far largely consumer oriented services (Web 2.0) into truly powerful tools for
organization communication are refreshing and important.
Udell focuses on enterprise vs. general web search and the impact of social bookmarking/tagging. He asks whether these technologies will be implemented intelligently as organizations shift towards internal use. "Given the opportunity," Udell write, "people will want to bookmark and tag the resources they publish internally. It’s the easiest way to create, manage, and share dynamic lists of such resources. This system pays for itself in improved personal productivity alone. Everything else is gravy, and there’s plenty of that." Makes it sound simple, doesn't he? "Is this the next-generation intranet? If so, we should sort out what we got wrong on the first try, and what we’ll get right this time around." It's enough to make a person ask why only 14 of us have tagged Udell's article in del.ico.us so far.
Tagging has long been a focus of his column. Previous articles that set the stage for this week's throwing down of the gauntlet include:
Collaborative Knowledge Gardening from August '04
Tag mania sweeps the web from July '05
Managing Metadata from October '05 (the longest and most technical of the four articles.)
Udell's own del.icio.us archive can also be seen, via his list of self-tagged podcasts.
Udell focuses on enterprise vs. general web search and the impact of social bookmarking/tagging. He asks whether these technologies will be implemented intelligently as organizations shift towards internal use. "Given the opportunity," Udell write, "people will want to bookmark and tag the resources they publish internally. It’s the easiest way to create, manage, and share dynamic lists of such resources. This system pays for itself in improved personal productivity alone. Everything else is gravy, and there’s plenty of that." Makes it sound simple, doesn't he? "Is this the next-generation intranet? If so, we should sort out what we got wrong on the first try, and what we’ll get right this time around." It's enough to make a person ask why only 14 of us have tagged Udell's article in del.ico.us so far.
Tagging has long been a focus of his column. Previous articles that set the stage for this week's throwing down of the gauntlet include:
Collaborative Knowledge Gardening from August '04
Tag mania sweeps the web from July '05
Managing Metadata from October '05 (the longest and most technical of the four articles.)
Udell's own del.icio.us archive can also be seen, via his list of self-tagged podcasts.
Wanted: taggable desktop newsreader
OK folks, I figure if anyone can tell me if such a thing already exists, it's you. I love NetNewsWire like it wuz my own chillren, but it kills me that I have to
categorize all my feeds singly. This is bad. I have to decide whether danah goes into "friends" or "web 2.0" or "women
in tech." She needs to be in all of them! Does supr.c.ilio.us belong in
"friends," "web 2.0," "tech commentary" or "snark" (which, luckily, now
warrants its own category)? You see my conundrum.
Web-based readers are out for me because I track too many feeds and performance quickly becomes an issue. Does anybody know of a desktop newsreader for the Mac that allows me to tag my feeds and see them in multiple places? Thanks in advance!
Web-based readers are out for me because I track too many feeds and performance quickly becomes an issue. Does anybody know of a desktop newsreader for the Mac that allows me to tag my feeds and see them in multiple places? Thanks in advance!
AJAXian Meta-search for tags: Keotag
Another gem from eHub today, Keotag is
a beautiful, multi-functional search engine that finds items tagged with your search term in 14 different tagging
systems (Technorati, del.icio.us, shadows, 43 things, etc.). Search results are returned quickly and displayed
with a very nice AJAX interface. There isn't support for Flickr or other photosharing apps, nor for video apps
that support tagging, but it is so smooth and fast that I'll be probably be using this instead of TagCentral from now on.
See also the tag creation function for your blog posts. Now if only they'd turn this into a bookmarklet or blummy plug-in.
Systems like this are notoriously fly-by-night, but this one has AJAX, pastel colors and rounded corners. So it's gotta be for real, right?
See also the tag creation function for your blog posts. Now if only they'd turn this into a bookmarklet or blummy plug-in.
Systems like this are notoriously fly-by-night, but this one has AJAX, pastel colors and rounded corners. So it's gotta be for real, right?
RFID virus demonstrated
ComputerWorld is reporting
that 3 scientists from the Netherlands demonstrated a proof-of-concept virus that could take over mock-up middle-ware on
a Radio Frequency ID (RFID) system, something few people thought was possible. "Pervasive computing utopia has its dark side," they say. The consequences here could
be huge, but thank goodness some one came public with this information before we all got implants. I know I was
totally excited to get an implant before this news burst my bubble ;)
RFID is likely one key part of the future of digital identity. Glad the conversation is complexifying beyond surveillance/civil liberties concerns and people without those concerns. I know I don't want to be wrongfully accused of hording an illicit number of unregistered Gillette razors in my bathroom.
RFID is likely one key part of the future of digital identity. Glad the conversation is complexifying beyond surveillance/civil liberties concerns and people without those concerns. I know I don't want to be wrongfully accused of hording an illicit number of unregistered Gillette razors in my bathroom.
Del.icio.us to add private bookmarks and more
Here's something that will make a lot of potential new users more comfortable, the tagging/social bookmarking service del.icio.us says they'll be rolling out the ability to mark some items
private next week. Presumably the vast majority of things bookmarked will still be social, so users won't
miss out on the network effect and search power.
Amongst other changes underway at del.icio.us is that the new URL info page that displays tags given a certain URL has added a "related items" feature - just like a couple of folks were showing off over the last few days via their use of the del.icio.us API.
Amongst other changes underway at del.icio.us is that the new URL info page that displays tags given a certain URL has added a "related items" feature - just like a couple of folks were showing off over the last few days via their use of the del.icio.us API.
Onlywire bookmarks well into multiple systems
Just found Onlywire over at eHub and I am
impressed. They have figured out how to very easily bookmark URLs into up to 15 different social bookmarking
services at once. Very smooth interface, very easy to use. I'm excited to be able to tag pages into del.icio.us for the community of users there and into Furl
for the page cache feature and more. The downside? You do miss out on any unique features of the tagging
interface of any of these individual systems, like the AJAX tagging and recommended tags of del.icio.us. That's a
shame, but Onlywire has an API so maybe some one will build something that mitigates this loss.
Listmixer is perishable bookmarks
I think I like this new app Listmixer. Its bookmarklet saves a URL for me,
lets me tag and describe it - and if 30 days ever go by without my looking at it, the link is deleted from my
account. I can hover over any of the links and get a menu for tagging them into del.icio.us, furl, newsvine,
reddit, simpy, blinklist and more. And I can grab my archive by RSS.
The functionality is smooth. The look is humorously unpretentious. I'm not quite sure how I'll fit this into my work flow yet, but I have a hunch it's going to find its place. Sites I'd like to subscribe to, for example, would be great to just tag into a temporary archive. If I haven't followed through in 30 days, then I probably wasn't that interested in the first place! It's the handy work of Sid Stewart and I discovered it via eHub.
The functionality is smooth. The look is humorously unpretentious. I'm not quite sure how I'll fit this into my work flow yet, but I have a hunch it's going to find its place. Sites I'd like to subscribe to, for example, would be great to just tag into a temporary archive. If I haven't followed through in 30 days, then I probably wasn't that interested in the first place! It's the handy work of Sid Stewart and I discovered it via eHub.
Are we held hostage by Yahoo's acquisitions?
Sometimes I'd like to try out new Social Bookmarking services, like one that just went public called Ma.gnolia. But if I go and try them out, will I lose everything I tag into that
archive if I decide to remain with del.icio.us - where the bulk of my bookmarks now
reside?
What's at issue here on one
level is a single sentence: "Our import feature has been turned off for a few days while we fix some bugs.
Sorry!" How long has that been what you get when you click "import" in del.icio.us? For
almost as long as I can remember.
That seems pretty disingenuous. The fact that the option remains on the screen, just crossed out, seems lazy. The fact that del.icio.us isn't listed on the Yahoo Properties Help Page at all seems downright apathetic or worse. (Neither is Flickr or Upcoming, you'll notice.)
What's at issue here on one
level is a single sentence: "Our import feature has been turned off for a few days while we fix some bugs.
Sorry!" How long has that been what you get when you click "import" in del.icio.us? For
almost as long as I can remember.That seems pretty disingenuous. The fact that the option remains on the screen, just crossed out, seems lazy. The fact that del.icio.us isn't listed on the Yahoo Properties Help Page at all seems downright apathetic or worse. (Neither is Flickr or Upcoming, you'll notice.)
Continue reading Are we held hostage by Yahoo's acquisitions?
Extratasty: your taggable wet bar
Finally, a highly pragmatic Web 2.0 service -- Extratasty is a social drink recipe site that lets you find new mixed drinks (or remember the ones you learned and promptly forgot) by search or by tag, see what newfangled concoctions your friends are trying, and rate recipes you've tried as well a see others' ratings. It's got a cool feature that takes the list of ingredients in your bar and narrows the search subset to drinks you can actually make with the materials you have at hand. I vote this tool Most Likely To Be Accessed Repeatedly At Web 2.0 Launch Parties.
[Via Download Squad]
Technorati adds multiple tag searches
Via Kevin Burton via Niall Kennedy: you can now do Technorati searches on multiple tags using the Boolean "or," such that a search on "folksonomy or ethnoclassification" (has the latter term officially died? There are precisely zero posts with this Technorati tag) will return you all blog posts with either tag. This takes care of some of the ambivalence problems in tagging, but I'm going to echo the sentiments of Tech Crunch and say that the Boolean "and" operator would also be highly useful for generating uber-relevant search results.
Tagzania = maps tags
It
only seems logical there would be a collaborative effort to add a folksonomy component to world mapping — enter Tagzania. Whereas 43places is more travel-oriented, focused on
photos and user experience and stories of places, Tagzania makes use of the Google maps API to actually add tags to the
maps themselves — so you can set a waypoint and tag it up. Each waypoint then becomes a "page" with an
RSS feed, to track what other users add over time. All content submitted becomes open content under a Creative Commons
ShareAlike license.
[Via Smartmobs]
What's the Dinnerbuzz, tell me what's cooking
Via the excellent You're It! blog on tagging comes
word of Dinnerbuzz, a folksonomy for restaurants. Since it's still nascent it hasn't
quite reached that critical mass of useful amounts of data yet, but the concept makes sense in the same way that 43places does: everybody travels (or, exists
somewhere), and everybody eats. It would be fantastic to be able to go to Dinnerbuzz and be assured of finding a great
place to chow down while travelling in unfamiliar territory, or to discover unknown places closer to home. As Alexandra
Samuel notes in her post, it's a glaring omission to not be able to narrow a search by rating —
so that you can limit your results to only the top-rated restuarants in Palo Alto, e.g. It also remains to be seen if
the site will attract enough of a userbase to invoke whatever strange alchemy can transmogrify a codebase into a
community.
Update: Justin Smith tells us search by rating has now been implemented! Now that's my kind of turnaround time. ;)
43places: travelling without moving
As a
travel buff, I'm digging on the new 43places social travel site, done by the 43things Robot Co-op folks.
It's yet another Ruby on Rails site, cleanly designed and easy
to use, and has the potential to become quite addictive. You can specify the places on your travel wishlist and find
out what others have said about those locations, as well as flag the places you've been and rate them, relate an
experience, and upload photos. There's also a — bless them — folksonomy component for tagging places, and a
whole myriad of ways to find people you might want to connect with — because they're geographically close to you,
they live in the places you want to go, or they want to go to the same places you do. Another way cool feature is that
if you upload photos to Flickr, tag them with place names and use a
Creative Commons license, 43places will pick them up via the magic that is web services. Now if you'll pardon me, I'm
off to keep procrastinating feeding my wanderlust. See you in Tibet!
