Tag - You're It

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Tag - You're It

I said in my inaugural work-related post of 2005 that the next big thing is the "architecture of participation." That is creating an architecture that allows all of us to participate in building the technology infrastructure that we use to live our lives. It includes open source, but is so much more than that.

Take tags for example. We'd all like the web, and all digital media for that matter, to be described in some way that's more than a URL and an index of the words/text associated with that media. But that's all we have now. There is no rich categorization scheme for digital media because it would be too expensive to create it and frankly almost impossible to maintain it.

Unless we were able to use the "architecture of participation" to do this for us.

And so, with that in mind, I have been spending some time with technorati's tags, del.icio.us, and flickr to better understand how community based tagging will impact the world of digital media.

All three services are related and in fact, Technorati has partnered with del.icio.us, flickr, and furl to supply them with many of their tags. They also allow bloggers to include tags in their posts.

I find the tagging approach of del.icio.us the most interesting because its a true community based tagging system. I haven't tried Furl yet, so it may well be that Furl does the same thing.

Letting bloggers tag their posts is fine, but letting everyone tag everything seems to me to be the most interesting and scalable approach.

Here is a great post on del.icio.us, how to use it, and why its so great. The comments are almost as good as the post itself.

Jeff Jarvis also has a good post on tagging and why its important.

But my favorite post on tags comes from Brian Dear who wants someone to build Taggle. I think its a great vision for where all of this can go if user generated tagging takes off the way I think it might.

As I am still in the early stages of using and understanding this stuff, any comments and thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

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» Tags & Folksonomies - What are they, and why should you care? from Threadwatch.org
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Tracked on Jan 25, 2005 10:04:21 AM

Posted January 19, 2005 in Venture Capital and Technology

Comments

Don't forget to check out the del.icio.us discuss list, it's a good place to add your input to the del.icio.us evolution.

http://lists.burri.to/pipermail/delicious-discuss/

Also, looks like your blog has had a lot of del.icio.us bookmarking lately. Congrats!

Posted by: toby | Jan 19, 2005 7:00:37 PM

For an alternative approach, you may be interested in reading about IBM's WebFountain technology which transforms unlabeled, unstructured data into XML-labeled data.

See, http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/jan04/0104comp1.html

Posted by: S | Jan 19, 2005 9:51:19 PM

I agree that tagging is going to be the next big thing. I can tell you the hottest thing on college campuses right now is www.thefacebook.com, which essentially is a website where you can tag yourself. You must have a college email address to use it, and I having graduated last year did not use it but a lot my friends did and still do. It is one of the most intuitive websites I've ever come across. Basically you put up your personal info including your class schedule, dorm/apt info, favorite movies, hobbies, friends, whatever you're interested in-this is nothing new. But what's cool is you can see everyone that likes the music you like, or that lives in your dorm, or has the same class as you just by clicking on the subject. So for example if I were to click on my favorite band (probably Wilco at the moment), I could instantly see all of the people on facebook who also said wilco was their favorite band. Also if you decide to browse through the website to look at others sites, you can actually see how you are connected to a person (it actually has in the upper corner a diagram that says for example :Tommy-knows-Lisa-knows-Joe-knows-YOU). Imagine that feature in the real world. Anyway just an interesting site about tagging people.

Posted by: dan | Jan 20, 2005 12:28:58 AM

You should really try Furl. It would be interesting to know how it copares against del.icio.use for you. I chose Furl over del.icio.us for a number of reasons that I described in this blog entry.

Posted by: Artem Frolov | Jan 20, 2005 3:03:38 PM

Jeff,

I'm the founder of e-thePeople.org, a digital townhall. Our site has struggled with the issue you discuss, and we implemented "themes" based on our editorial sense of what people on our site were talking about. It ends up working like tags on a group blog, and I have to say, for a variety of reasons the uptake among posters hasn't been great.

The rest of our site works by an organic "bubble up" process with user ratings, and I've always wished that what we call themes (aka tags) could be created organically. Just as the readers are the editors (in the sense of gatekeepers), perhaps they should also be the taggers.

Another idea that I had is to look tags from a network perspective. Think of the world wide web as a directed graph representation of conversation. Sometimes the dialogue is direct: in this comment, I am directly responding to your post. But you also link to several other sites, which are indirectly part of the conversation. For example, you recognize that this is ongoing conversation linked to your earlier idea of "architecture of participation" and the site del.icio.us. And as your track back shows, sometimes other people link to you.

If we were to draw this graph, it would be clear that these related internet posts were all part of a greater conversation about tagging.

Is there anyway to tease out that theme, "tagging," automatically? At first I thought, hey, this is google again. An automatic way to index content based on what it talks about and how others refer to it. But it's actually slightly different, because these tags or themes have a timeliness aspect that google doesn't try to capture. Now, I'm thinking of a cross between technorati and pubsub.

Well, I enjoy reading your thoughts about this subject as they develop . As I see it from my internet+politics perspective, the stakes are high: nothing less than the (inter?)national agenda.

- Mike

Posted by: Michael Weiksner | Jan 21, 2005 4:11:13 PM

I think that tagging is hugely important, but I don't think that it's the only method of digitally marking data. This is what Tim Berners Lee mentioned in his original article about the Semantic Web.

Categorization (such as occurs on yahoo or amazon or ebay) is one way.

The dynamic taxonomy that google builds every time its webcrawlers come back and weight content based on the data elements it finds in the content is another way.

I think this is definitely very important though, and I'm excited to think about the new ways we will have to digitally mark (semantically) data in the near future. Groovy.

Chuck

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