Search Results for folksonomy
The trouble with folksonomy? User versus author-tagging.
Via Ryan King,
via Ericka Menchen
comes the idea that the term folksonomy is problematic
because we apply it both to systems in which authors tag their own content as well as to systems in which users can tag
the content of others. I'm not entirely convinced this is problematic (nor am I convinced a clean-edged distinction
between the two can be found in most systems), because in both cases, nobody (author or user) is beholden to some a
priori defined hierarchy into which they must stuff their content. The point is — the "folks" get to choose our own
(multiple) tags/categories, whether we're earmarking content for ourselves or for our audiences.
Still, the distinction is an interesting one: how does the intended "audience" affect tagging practice? Do we choose
"safer," more established tags when we tag for others, versus the more "localized" tags we might give to bits of data
we just want to be able to find later? And, is there any reason we can't have the best of both worlds, with ...
Visualizing shared metadata: the tag landscape
Let's talk about tags, baby. While some continue to debate the usefulness of tag-based folksonomies, others are
starting to build abstraction layers on top of a growing body of user-tagged data. Java and flash-based tools are
beginning to emerge that visually map the relationships between tags, as well as exploring the relationships between
users themselves. ...
Continue reading Visualizing shared metadata: the tag landscape
Going metameta with Supr.c.ilio.us, the social tagging site tagging site
You tag to live and live to tag, but how do you tag the
taggables? Supr.c.ilio.us, the social tagging site tagging site. This is
tongue-in-cheek folksonomy, folks.
[Via
Download
Squad] ...
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] ...
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. ...
This week's highlights from eHub
Lots of people love Emily Chang's eHub, a site she describes as "a constantly updated list of web applications, services, resources, blogs or sites with a focus on
next generation web (web 2.0), social software, blogging, Ajax, Ruby on Rails, location mapping, open source,
folksonomy, design and digital media sharing." I find it interesting that it has so many subscribers,
almost 4600, and I imagine it's because people like the human editing of selections. None the less, there are a
lot of services posted there and I thought readers might enjoy an even further narrowing of the week's highlights. From 39 services listed on eHub this week, my 5 favorite are: ...
Video takes off in social software land
It seems only natural that social software would see a progression from text (blogs) to audio (podcasting) to video
(vlogging) as developers and users all got hip to this many-to-many concept of sharing ideas, self-expressions,
experiences, etc., and as the cost of the tools of production continues to fall. It seems that the proliferation of
video content is in the midst of an explosion, as videoblogging or vlogging takes hold and gives people a very unique
alternative to ye olde broadcast media's highly-produced cable TV offerings. The recent launch of
Ourmedia as an entirely free web host repository and community for citizen video
(as well as audio), as well as the advent of tools such as the ANT RSS video
aggregator (Mac desktop client) and the web-based videoblogger aggregator Mefeedia
(which also adds a
folksonomy component)
seem to herald video's arrival on the social software scene in a big way. How many of you are getting involved in
social video, either on the production or ...
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! ...
Yahoo's My Web 2.0 implements social search
Things are getting interesting. Yahoo's new My Web 2.0
is now in beta, which taps into your already trusted
networks to (ideally) give you more relevant search results based on what the folks you know have recommended. I've had
the chance to start playing around with it a bit, and it seems so far to be the adorable lovechild of traditional
search and social bookmarking services. It brings to
regular search the spicy flavors of trust and serendipity and, praise be,
folksonomy (it's true, I'm a fool for tags). You can
save, tag and annotate your Yahoo search results, flag
them as public or private, and narrow a search to give results only from the subset of pages your contacts have saved.
Again, bless them, they're providing an open API for
developers to tweak, so look for some sweet new applications to be built up on top of this. They also articulate a long
range goal of seeing communities build up their own localized search engines on specific topics or areas of interest —
an ...
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. ;) ...
Webjay: social playlisting
If the advent of P2P
taught us anything, it's that people tend to be intensely social about their musical favorites. Though the sharing of
music is still officially mired in legal complications, music lovers keep finding creative new ways to end-run around
the long reach of the RIAA.
Webjay achieves this feat by helping users create, publish and listen to playlists
of authorized music — music that is Creative Commons licensed, is in the
public domain, or for which approval has been obtained from the artist. Creating playlists is as simple as cutting and
pasting media file URLs into the playlist interface or, even easier, using a javascript bookmarklet to post an MP3
directly, without the need to invoke the Webjay back end. There is even a function
that will "scrape" a page of media files and generate a playlist automagically. Once playlisted, other users of the
site can load the collection into their media player of choice and listen with one click.
The whole process serves as a means ...
Odeo first impressions
Just last night I was asked if I had checked out Odeo, and today my inbox contained
an invite to the beta site. Odeo is to podcasting what Mefeedia is to videoblogging
— it brings the world of podcasts (or at least some subset thereof) into a single browseable interface and adds a
folksonomy component. Its functionality is threefold: listen, sync and create — you can browse and listen to podcasts
right inside your browser, download a desktop syncing application to pull down subscribed podcasts to your desktop and
portable player, and — eventually, though it's not yet live — actually produce podcasts via the web interface itself,
or via phone.
The interface itself is fairly simple, uncluttered and easy to use. The site offers a number of different ways to find
new content: via tags, via what's new (both individual shows and channels), what's popular, featured channels, and the
zeitgeist — what people are currently listening to. This sort of aggregation adds value ...
CNet rolls out Shoebox meta photo-sharing application
Via Steve Rubel, the news that CNet has
rolled out their own photo-sharing service (hot on the heels of
Yahoo, who launched theirs last week) as a
spinoff of their Webshots division. Shoebox does something a bit different from the usual photo-sharing fare, in that
it's acting as a sort of "meta-bookmark" service that can pull in images from anywhere around the web to store, tag and
share. It'll scrape a page of images, or you can submit RSS feeds as a "source" for new photos, and bookmark/store
individual images from out of the stream of images. Any photo can be shared via email, plus you can browse photos by
tag, by user, and by recently added images as with other photo folksonomies. What's uber-cool is the ability to totally
remix and mashup your shoebox collection by using a combination of photo source selection and tag filters, and then get
an RSS feed of the result. This would make it easy to generate a feed of your top 5 favorite
Flickr groups all rolled into a single feed, for example. ...
The long tail: how does it relate to social software?
I have been following the concept of the long tail as it
relates to business and statistics, and have recently begun to discern how the long tail may relate to social software.
The long tail as defined by statistic refers to a distribution effect that can be visualized by the graph at right, in
which a small portion of 'popular' events occurs very often (red), whereas the vast majority of events occurs far more
rarely (yellow). This overall population of rare events, however, is itself quite large — this huge population of low
amplitude events is known as the long tail.
Tim Bray muses the long tail to be "a
tangled mess of microcommunities and subcultures and tribes and hobbies and fanatics." He goes on to posit that
although these informal social communities have always existed, the interlinking power of the web is finally making
these structures visible because they "now they span the globe in real-time." With the advent of social tools on the
web, members of the long tail are ...
Approaching a definition of Web 2.0
Many folks are working towards
getting at the
heart of the
Web 2.0 revolution. I agree that
visualizations such as Tim O'Reilly's or
Dion Hinchcliffe's are
not simple enough ? they're too
jargon-filled and don't do much to describe the big picture in human-readable terms. I really like
Richard MacManus's
breakdown: "Web 2.0 is really about normal everyday
people using the Web and creating things on it - forget the acronyms." Susan
Mernit also captures this well:
"The heart of Web 2.0 is the user... The tools power it, but the people do it."
I'm also going to throw in some of my own ideas into this asymptotic approximation of the curious wonder that is
Web 2.0: visualization, ho!
...
