I’m honored to let you know that our article about faceted tags and Facetag has been requested to be part of the June-July number of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
The Bulletin is a bi-monthly magazine packed with developments and issues affecting the field, pragmatic management reports, opinion, and news […]
I loved Rawsugar. I helped them improving bringing in my two cents and I came to knew Frank Smadja, a very smart guy and VP of Rawsugar.
The site has been sold and while users were said data would have been kept safe for the time to come it seems I lost all my bookmarks. I […]
As I promised, here it is our deck:
Comments welcome.
You can find the new paper, navigation videos and other papers at Facetag.org. The new completely recoded ajaxy and web2.0ish application will be made available in the coming weeks.
I’ve talked before about LibraryThing as one of the best examples of advanced use of tagging tecniques.
LibraryThing (11M of books) lets users catalogue and tag books. Subject headings are shown side by side with people assigned tags. You can browse using a top down approach or fly horizontally leveraging tags. A bonus is the possibility […]
At the end, Italy is catching up with the Web 2.0 revolution.
In the last few weeks I was interviewed and asked for advices for some of the major italian newspapers. I was also invited to participate to a number of public meetings and roundtables both on the folksonomies and web 2.0 topic.
Barcamps are now spreading […]
I’m proud of being among the bold knights that will compose the committee of the wonderful Tagging Workshop part of the WWW2007 this year in Banff, Canada.
The WWW2007 is the “annual gathering place of the international community to discuss and debate the future evolution of the Web” currently at its 16th edition.
The Tagging Workshop at […]
To be sincere I’m really surprised. I couldn’t believe it and I’m very very excited: Facetag has been accepted as a research paper for the international IA Summit to be held in March in Las Vegas.
Facetag was presented already at the EuroIA and at the SWAP this year, but the IA Summit is a mondial […]
Analysts (but also experts) make their money giving predictions, insights, forecasts.
Gartner, for example, yearly publishes a Hype Cycle for Emergent Technologies and a Hype cycle for Web Applications. I sincerely like this work, because it can help you to build a bigger picture about all the new things that come around during the year […]
As I wrote in my preliminary post about FaceTag, this project is actually quite unique in its kind.
I think about it as a sort of bridge between emergent and traditional classification tools. A mixed sauce that aims to smoothen both the limits of controlled vocabularies and of plain folksonomies.
The feedback that we got at […]
2007 seems to be an extraordinary year for the education on social tagging and web 2.0 applications more generally.
Joining Research and Practice: Social Computing and Information Science will probably be among the richest conferences and will be held October 18-25, in (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) as a part of the ASIS&T Annual Meeting.
The deep change that is […]
After two years and a half, this is my last day in Accenture. Among my competencies here, defining the strategy and evangelizing about customer experience and its value for our clients with consulting and operational roles on a number of web related projects (you know gathering requirements, working on the information architecture and interaction design, […]
Today, Vittorio Loreto (PIL Group, Physics Department of La Sapienza University) invited me to partecipate to the kick-off meeting of an innovative research project funded by the European Commission in the framework of the FET proactive initiative Simulating Emergent Properties in Complex Systems.
The TAGora project aims to leverage online social systems to […]
Lately, every and each day, a new folksonomical web 2.0 startup seems to born. Going a step further and trying to catch their mission, their added value, the innovation they introduce very often you will find nothing new!
As if Web 2.0 was a goal in itself: creating a new service inspired to the widespread new […]
David Sifry gives us an update on the blogosphere status seen from Technorati.com:
Over 35.3 37.3 Million blogs
The blogosphere is doubling every 6 months
Its size is 60 times bigger than 3 years ago
A new weblog every second
19.4 million bloggers (55%) still active after 3 months
As you may expect, the blogosphere is still growing at an incredible […]
Paul Heymann and Hector Garcia-Molina (Department of Computer Science, Stanford University) have recently published the paper Collaborative Creation of Communal Hierarchical Taxonomies in Social Tagging Systems.
Paul is a PhD student doing research on how to recreate hierarchical taxonomies from flat tag data, moving from the idea that this kind of structure is already implicitly (on […]
Lately I’m really focused on the evolution of tagging. To find the new way you have to know the old path.. so I’m frequently coming back to faceted classification and Ranganathan’s ideas.
To add a structure on tags, a few different approaches seem to be viable. Clustering is among the most famous now.
On this topic, Marti […]
Web 2.0 Introduction
When the dot com bubble burst in the fall of 2001, the Web as we knew it went through a dramatic change. The idealistic, overenthusiastic and highly dynamic vision of the Internet pioneers suddenly imploded, leaving room for a period of rational pragmatism, refinement and reflection in which costs and value maximization gained […]
I’m not sure that all tagging problems are limited to visualization issues in current tag clouds. My opinion is that we lack that fundamental structure that has been lost reaching a flat set of keywords. Yes, this approach allowed that wild tagging adoption, but now it’s time to reintroduce a little of structure.
Anyway a few […]
I’m again and again thinking about how tagging, as we know it now, is not working. It simply cannot scale and it cannot be really applied to contexts in which finding or keeping things found is fundamental.
A post that I read casually from Volkan Ozcelik impressed me a lot:
In need of organizing my tags
I have […]
Since a few people asked me about that, here is the link to the ppt deck from the italian IA Summit.
I gave a talk about the evolution of the social tagging introducing my ideas about the future of folksonomies:
Faceted Tagging (Mefeedia) Editors create mutually exclusive facets and users assign tags to facets
Advanced Navigation Iterative […]
After having managed the first Italian IA Summit, I’m preparing to head to Vancouver for the IA Summit 2006. I will be there from March, 22th to March, 28th (back in Italy the day after).
I will have a free day and I will follow Peter Morville’s Information Architecture & Findability.
For the real conference, I […]
With the desire of continuing the discussion about the evolution of tagging, I’m going to post a few links about comments on my previous Folksonomies 2.0 - The chaotic order:
Wikisomies - David Weinberg
Folksonomies 2.0 - M@moo
Faceted Tags - Beyond Folksonomies
Folksonomy 2.0 - kurai
Are folksonomies scalable? - Tara Hunt
I invite you to give […]
I have a tags related idea that periodically comes back to my mind. Yesterday I had a chat with Peter Van Dijck about it.
Folksonomies are a very widespread concept today and also a few big magazines have understood their revolutionary approach and value.
What I’m asking to myself is: “Since a year ago, which evolution […]
I’d like to link a curious (at least for me) folksonomy review “Folksonomies fascinate me” by a librarian perspective. Some of the points:
Folksonomies fascinate me, in no small part because they are a direct response to a failing of our profession which has irritated me since library school days..
When embarking on a piece of analysis, […]
My overview paper on folksonomies is ready. I’ve the honour to publish it for the italian chapter of the ISKO (International Society for Knowledge Organization). An official presentation will follow at the ISKO Italy-UniMIB meeting : Milan : June 24, 2005.
Some of the topics covered: a story of folksonomies, their properties, the differences with […]
From Antonella Pastore on HyperGuru some observations about the redesign of Technorati, currently in beta.
The improvements are related to:
a better user experience
increased tag based functionalities
increased usage of Rss feeds
The graphical interface benefits from a tabbed approach and Dhtml use for the search. The content is more structured and everything can be found in the right […]
Using Yahoo API exposed through “Search Web Services”, John Herren access Yahoo content and services to build a new useful layer on Yahoo News called News Tag Soup.
News Tag Soup is an experiment on automatic news organization and retrieval using tagging: news are retrieved from Yahoo News and keywords are automatically associated to them.
Keywords (or […]
From a Scoble’s post New browser-based aggregator turns on I’ve discovered FeedTagger, a new online feeds aggregator.
FeedTagger has two innovative features:
you can organize and search feeds associating multiple tags to the them
it is based on Ajax to garantee a fast, smooth and effective interface
Other noteworthy characteristics:
It permits OPML import
It is web based
[…]
Lately we’ve seen a lot of discussion about the role of folksonomies, search engines and traditional classifications. The conclusion seemed to be that folksonomies suggest a serendipity approach to information retrieval, while taxonomies and search engines (in two different ways) are more useful for a targeted, specific search.
But the question is:
Search engines and tagging […]
Probably the first post about folksonomies, long before the term was coined and social softwares like del.icio.us and flickr saw the light, was written by Peter Merholz and is dated 11/10/2001!
In a post titled Vernacular Thesauri, Peter talked about user generated classification after attending to ASIST 2001.
Her talk got me thinking about community-generated, or “vernacular” […]
User Interface Engineering presents a nice post from Joshua Portar of Bokardo titled Folksonomies: A User-Driven Approach to Organizing Content.
Nothing new but a few phrases to notice about the pros that folksonomies have in respect to taxonomies
Folksonomies…addresses two of the most difficult problems with taxonomies.
First:
The information within folksonomies is organized and maintained by users, […]
I’m actually preparing an article to summarize the online material about folksonomies and social/free tagging.
Looking on the site of Adaptive Path I’ve found a simply essay on the topic:
Metadata for the Masses from Peter Merholz
It’s nice to notice the date of the article: October 19, 2004. At that time folksonomies we’re still not very […]
Using WP-Tags from R.B. Boyer i began usign free-tagging to associate a keyword to this blog’s posts. The basic inner working is based on WP custom-fields.
What I’m using here it’s not a full folksonomy because the only one tagging posts here it’s me. So we can talk of a personomy that anyway it’s useful to […]
After looking for a lot of discussion about folksonomies, we can ask which use you can do practically of them. An example on Bokardo Bloglines introduces “unique to me�, What are microformats good for?, and Naming:
What I’m not sold on yet is the usefulness of microformats. I don’t have any use for them yet, and […]
From Joshua Porter on his Bokardo, i was reading a pretty old post about Controlled Vocabularies and Folksonomies
As always Joshua makes some good points about the different approach of vocabularies and folksonomies:
The biggest peculiarity of folksonomies is that:
folksonomies …… are harnessing user behavior, rather than predicting or dictating it. The key to this is the […]
I’m constantly asking myself which possible uses we could found for Folksonomies from an economical perspective.
Folksonomies are a mean to produce money?
Some good insight from Micro Persuasion (Steve Rubel) on his post Get Folksy with Folksonomies.
A short list of references about the discussion from which folksonomies born:
Thomas Vander Wal: Off the Top Folksonomy Entries
Peter Van Dijck: Emergent i18n effects in folksonomies
Adam Mathes: Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata
Clay Shirky: Folksonomy on Many2Many
More to come..
Again from Joshua Porter an enlightning post entitled I’ve Heard of Folksonomies. Now How do I Apply them to My Site?.
The title is a little misleading in my opionion, but the meaning very very clear and the narration always precise.
Joshua is reflecting about the real power of folksonomies that does not necessarily concerns the tagging […]
From Joshua Porter’s post IBM’s Taxonomies and Comparing Knowledge Systems a link to a report (not free) from David Weinberger about the relationships between Taxonomies (trees), Faceted Systems (Forests) and Tagging Systems (folksonomies as leaves).
The interesting conclusions of the report makes order on the last days discussions:
Because they are unambiguous, trees work well […]
While the discussion (apparently) for or vs folksonomies goes on, Clay Shirky on Many2Many article puts a point.
As a lot of us agree, probably we’re on a river where we aren’t allowed to chose a direction: we can only go on following the flow.
In front of economic reasons, a less accurate and professional classification […]
Clay Shirky and Louis Rosenfeld seems to have diffent ideas about controlled vocabolaries and folksonomies pros and cons as you can see reading Clay’s post. Lou is still skeptical about the potentialities of folksonomies, Clay points out that it is only a matter of size and cost that sometimes makes manual professional classification simply impossible:
” […]
MarK T some weeks ago proposed a simple approach to merge taxonomies and folksomies in Enterprise Distributed Categorisation.
His idea is basically using a folksonomy as an initial material for a card sorting that permits to an information architect to extrapolate a full taxonomy from user’s social tagging.
This approach could also mix the benefits of both […]
Louis Rosenfeld still remains skeptical about folksonomies as retrieval tools for they lack scalability and structure. In my opinion the goal is a metadata ecology, where the best tools (taxonomies and folksonomies for example) work together to maximize findability and real user centred design.
IBM will soon experiment with folksonomy. They are motivated by a need to maintain the pace of updates to how information is organized in their intranet and a need to help users access their system.
In the last few days, I was searching for a summary on the discussion about folksonomies. A good list of links of up to date discussions was presented at the IA Summit in Montreal from:
Gene Smith
Peter Morville
Peter Merholz
Thomas Vander Wal
From the IA Summit in Montreal, Gene Smith at Atomiq gives the presentations’ links for the […]
An interesting post about folksonomies and Google Suggest..
Is there a way to “force” a controlled vocabulary on social tagging aside from feedback loop (most famous tags float to the top as a suggestion for users) proposed from Flickr.com?
Is there somewhere out there a scalable solution as tags’ cardinality increases?
Google shows the path.. Take […]
