I never used My Web 1.0 so I’m not sure how much of this is new, but Yahoo is currently beta testing My Web 2.0, which it calls a social search engine and which features tagging and searching “with a little help from your friends” as its main features. Sounds a bit like del.icio.us to me. Were the flickr folks involved in this?
Oh, and here’s the ‘everyone’ tag cloud for My Web 2.0 so far.
Update: Here’s a much better look at My Web 2.0 from my cranky interlocutor, Ross.
What do tags taste like? Dinnerbuzz may give us an answer. Think of the site as 43Meals: it’s a collaborative restaurant reviewing system where diners tag each restaurant review with tags like “outdoor”, “beer”, “excellent” etc. (Nothing has yet been rated delicious.) Each review also includes a rating.
The idea of using tags as a reviewing tool has lots of potential, since it offers the possibility of finding restaurants that meet a particular appetite for pizza, Persian or patios. Every city in the database gets its own page, which shows you which restaurants are being most frequently tagged in that city. And Dinnerbuzz gets full marks for offering XML feeds on each tag and city page: never again will you be the last to hear of that great new cafe in Menlo Park.
There are a few implementation hiccups: while you can search by tag (and even multiple tags) you can’t search by rating. But I’m not interested in finding a Mexican restaurant, I’m interested in finding a good Mexican restaurant, so I want to be able to limit the results of my tag search to restaurants with a certain minimum rating. And ratings alone aren’t going to pull me into a restaurant: I want to have some description that tells me why I might want to go, what I should order, and how I’ll feel the next morning. I’m guessing that the Dinnerbuzz gang was more excited about coding than eating because the reviews that are on there so far are mostly limited to tags and ratings.
The other challenge Dinnerbuzz faces is the challenge that folksonomies place on any site: until you get to a certain critical mass, the wide variation in how people use tags means that there’s an awful lot of noise and chaos. For example, I’m not sure how useful the tag vibe is in identifying possible dinner spots — yet it does produce a couple of results. But if I search on Indian — and who doesn’t want a curry at least once a week? — there’s only one result so far. This is a site that won’t be useful until there is a whack of people using it — and that could take a while. Meanwhile Dinnerbuzz may want to provide some gentle encouragement to tag restaurants with the information that folks are most likely to be seeking: ethnicity/genre; special features (patio, delivery, etc); and with a consistent set of qualitative tags like bad, mediocre, ok, good, excellent (right now this seems to happen strictly informally).
If Dinnerbuzz could hook up with structured blogging we might see bloggers helping to populate its reviews. I’d love to see Dinnerbuzz accumulate a useful set of reviews for Vancouver but I think that will happen fastest if it can integrate with existing review sites like VanEats.
If you like your yummies metaphorical rather than literal, check out Yummy, now in alpha testing. It’s a collaboratively tagged collection of PDFs on a range of topics, with a transparent business model: any of the PDFs can be printed and shipped to you by Print FU. If the PDF you want isn’t there you can upload your own.
Yummy might be an interesting way of finding PDFs, but heck, I can do that on Google. What would make me really happy is if Yummy had a set-up that let me store all the PDFs that are cluttering up my hard drive on their site, and made it easy to print from there without downloading the PDF in the process. That would provide folks with an incentive to upload and could quickly turn Yummy into an awesome virtual library.
Meanwhile, both Dinnerbuzz and Yummy remind me that how much I’d like folks to standardize the address syntax for tag-specific pages. To give you a sense of the variation, here’s how you’d find the tag page for “beer” on a few sites:
Dinnerbuzz: http://www.dinnerbuzz.com/tag.php?beer
Yummy: http://yummy.printfu.org/yum.cfm/search/beer
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/beer
Could we all just give del.icio.us credit for its first mover status (and its very nice, simple URLS) and adopt the common syntax: http://www.yoururl.com/tag/whatever
I want to be able to go to any tagged site and know how to find the tag page I’m looking for. For that matter I want to be able to add any RSS feed for any tagged site to my aggregator without having to check the URL first, so again, let’s follow the del.icio.us example: http://www.yoururl.com/rss/tag/whatever
It may not seem like it matters SO much now but once we start building all of our daily information tools around tag subscriptions it will make life a heck of a lot easier.
Tonight (June 14) marks the inaugural meeting of Tag Tuesday, a planned monthly meeting for Bay Area tag developers.
That’ s it. I’m moving to San Francisco.
John Hiler has an interesting post on Microcontentnews called Google’s War on Hierarchy, and the Death of Hierarchical Folders. He talks about how that computing standby the folder is being replaced by search and tags:
Hierarchical Folders have helped us manage information for decades. They’ve proven themselves as some of the most flexible tools ever created: organizing wildly different industries, from Web Directories, to Email and Desktop File Systems.
But Folders rarely solve the core problem that they address – and often create new ones, like forcing you to create new folders just to manage new information. Solutions like Search, Archives, Stars and Labels get more directly at the core problem… and promise that the future of information management will look very different from its past.
Dan Brown posted a thoughtful follow-up that digs into the distinctions between hierarchy and structure:
Hiler is right to point out that folder-based navigation is going away, but I think it’s dangerous to extend the demise of the folder (a bad metaphor) to the demise of hierarchy and formal structure. There is still a place for formal structure in interface design, even if it doesn’t look or behave like our old friend the folder.
It’s also dangerous to compare “hierarchy” with “search.” Hierarchy is, most typically, a part-whole organization of things. Search, on the other hand, is a behavior where users specify some criteria and the computer does the work of locating objects that share something in common with them. These two notions are hardly mutually exclusive. Perhaps Hiler meant to compare search with browse, a behavior where users select from menus of options to arrive at the desired thing.
In Hiler’s three “search” case studies, there is evidence of formal structure, though it’s under the surface. With Gmail, for example, there’s still the notion of a thread which contains messages. There is an inbox and an archive, which contain threads. There are relationships between original messages and replies. These are abstract hierarchies that are inherent to the information architecture, not layered on top like a folder structure. They may seem self-evident, but constructing these hierarchies requires a careful, user-aware design process.
Indeed, structure is useful. And instead of one structural option–the folder–we now have derived structure (like search engine indexes and the derived polyhierarchies in iTunes) and user-applied structure (tags, labels, links, playlists). This is not the death of hierarchy; it’s the augmentation of hierarchy.
Talk about rapid response! The codemonkeys at Gataga report that they have already added all the features I mentioned in my post yesterday. If Ben and Jerry were half as responsive to my suggestions, we’d all have chocolate-covered espresso beans in our ice cream by now.
With the addition of RSS feeds and a longer list of sites searched, Gataga will be a very useful tool for anyone trying to keep track of the ever-expanding amount of tagged content on an ever-expanding number of social bookmarking sites. I’ve just subcribed to a search on the tag “e-democracy”, and I imagine all the good folk tracking the “nptech” tag will find this useful for their purposes too.
One more suggestion for the codemonkeys: one of the nice features of Gataga’s web-based search is that you see where each result comes from (del.icio.us, blogmarks, jots, etc.). It would be great if that info could be included in the RSS feeds too; one of the interesting benefits of Gataga’s service is that it lets you see which services people use to bookmark the subjects you’re interested in.
A comment on one of my del.icio.us posts directed me to a new social bookmarking search engine, Gataga. In principle it’s a great idea, in that it lets you simultaneously search del.icio.us, blogmarks, blinklist and Jots for a given tag.
But at least the beta version falls hugely short by not providing RSS feeds for the search results, which is absolutely essential to making this kind of tag aggregator into a useful tool. If it provided RSS fees for search results I would immediately subscribe to Gataga feeds for searches on e-democracy, tagging etc. As-is I’m still going to be dependent on del.icio.us- and Furl-specific feeds for those tags so why bother checking Gataga for the few additional items that the big 2 might have missed?
If Gataga starts providing RSS feeds — and if it can find a way to incorporate Furl, and ideally also Simpy, Spurl and maybe even Connotea results — it could turn out to be a handy tool.
The beta Technorati makeover is now online and hurrah! it includes RSS feeds for tag pages. These feeds will make it much easier for people to aggregate blog-related content from across the web by subscribing to a particular tag feed — either within a newsreader like Bloglines or for republishing on a web site news aggregator (like the one that Bryght runs on its Drupal CMS).
Technorati’s tag feeds will be a great boon to the folks who are already using tagging as a collaboration tool, like the non-profit technology community that has adopted the tag nptech. Nptech will now have an RSS feed that aggregates blog posts with the nptech category/tag.
Note that while Flickr, del.icio.us and Furl links are included in Technorati’s own tag pages, these links are not included in the feed. But that’s just as well since you can get RSS feeds directly from those sites, and not everyone will want to aggregate photos and links along with blog posts.
Depending on update times this could be the way to handle the event tagging challenges that Carolyn Minor brought up last week.
One axis of human sense-making runs from applied to derived; some things we understand by applying explanations to them, and others we understand by deriving explanations from them.
The component parts of water and the component parts of breakfast can both be described. Breakfast, however, exists only by definition — breakfast is the morning meal because we say it is, and even then, there are lots of caveats. A restaurant can advertise “Breakfast All Day!”; the same food at the same time can be breakfast or brunch; and so on.
Water is easier to explain than breakfast because water exists independently of any community — its existence can be derived by independent observers. Breakfast exists only because of and among people who say it does — it is an applied category, and therefore contingent on various ways of generating and enforcing shared understanding.
Because applied categories are social facts, they take more energy to define, and those definitions are less encompassing, less coherent, and less robust than for derived categories. And of course this is not a bifurcation but a spectrum. Imagine the difficulty of explaining each of three categories: “the New York Times,” “the media,” and “the liberal media”; or “the Republican Party,” “the conservative movement,” and “the vast right-wing conspiracy.” Each of those three categories is increasingly difficult to explain, because each is more of an applied category than the last, which is to say each requires more shared assumptions between sender and receiver.
Systems of classification frequently mix derived and applied categories. The more ambitious a system, in fact, the likelier it is to do so. If a significant number of the categories we use in our daily lives are applied, then large-scale classification systems will weaken with any of several changes, including especially an increase in the number or mix of users, an increase in the number of things to be classified, a decrease in coordination among the people doing the classifying, and the passage of time.
One strategy for improving classification schemes, or at least making them resistant to the inherent weakness of applied categories, is to reduce, possibly to zero, the number of universal assumptions or constraints within the system. This will minimize the energetic requirements of communicating and enforcing applied categories, while allowing the categories themselves to flow where and among whom they are considered useful or valid.
And this, of course, is exactly what tagging does. Much of the shared value, with little of the required force.
Tom Coates has a great post over at Plasticbag that deals with the difference between del.icio.us-style tagging (filing) vs. Flickr-style tagging (annotative). This overly long excerpt lays it out (emphasis mine, urls redacted):
Matt Webb and I did a fair amount of work around tagging with a project called Phonetags that I never get time to properly write up. As we were working on it, we came to realise that each of us had a radically different understanding of what a tag was. Matt’s concept was quite close to the way tagging is used in del.icio.us – with an individual the only person who could tag their stuff and with an understanding that the act of tagging was kind of an act of filing. My understanding was heavily influenced by Flickr’s approach – which I think is radically different – you can tag other people’s photos for a start, and you’re clearly challenged to tag up a photo with any words that make sense to you. It’s less of a filing model than an annotative one.
When I came to use del.icio.us I approached tagging in the way that made sense to me from Flickr. So any and all links were covered with loads of keywords with no thought for how they ought to clump together. I just tried to describe what the link was about in some way. Joshua and I had a bit of an argument about the way I was using it, actually. The browsing interface didn’t really suit an approach that had an enormous number of orphaned tags. You can get a sense of how out of control it all got with this visualisation of my tags. At the end of the argument I said to Joshua that it was almost like he was treating tags as folders. And he replied, exasperated, that this was exactly what they were. It was just that now an object could exist comfortably in a number of folders so you didn’t have to enforce an arbitrary heirarchy on your filing…
So two radically different forms of tagging that really share very little in common with one another – which leads to the question, is there room for two different paradigms here (at least) or will there be some refactoring and adaptation that moves us towards one or other model?
Then, by looking at how people are tagging his weblog Coates proposes a hypothesis: “the shift from people using blogs to blog [as tags for Plasticbag] represents the increasing dominance of a Flickr-style paradigm of tagging… It is my conjecture, therefore, that the folder metaphor is losing ground and the keyword one is currently assuming dominance.”
What do you think? I suspect people are mixing methods already–using some folder-type tags (e.g. toread) along with other annotative ones.
The whole post is well worth the read–for the graphs and the novel thinking about tagging (finally!).
Carolyn Minor, a librarian at the University of Winnipeg, has put out a call for help on event tagging. She’s noted the difficulties in setting up effective tagging for event blogs, which is something I struggled with myself in setting up the event blog for the 2005 Online Deliberation conference.
The main problem I ran into is that I have yet to find an accessible and effective tool for tag-based searching of blogs. For a brief and beautiful moment I thought Feedster was capable of searching blogs based on a
Of course these options just address the technical challenge around tag aggregation. They don’t touch the more fundamental problem, which is that it’s awfully hard to get people to do collaborative tagging unless they already blog, know something about RSS, and know something about tagging.
My own solution to this dilemma is to treat event blogging as an opportunity to ease people into the world of blogging and RSS by encouraging them to set up accounts on the conference blog itself, so they can post from there. I also set up e-mail-based aggregation so that people can submit photos and blog posts by e-mailing them to specific e-mail addresses, which then get aggregated into the site. That gets them into the swing of things and perhaps gets them interested in setting up blogs of their own.
In other words, figure that outside (and maybe even inside) of events for bloggers in particular, you’re not going to be able to make a go of a tag-centred event blog. But you can build in a bunch of other aggregation options that let people participate in less-techie ways, and include tagging as an option for the tag-savvy few.