loose wire

After del.icio.us, a Directory of Other Things Yahoo! Should Buy

The Loose Wire Yahoo Blessing continues, as del.icio.us gets bought by y.ah.oo!. From Joshua Schacter’s blog:

We're proud to announce that del.icio.us has joined the Yahoo! family. Together we'll continue to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet, with a big emphasis on the power of community. We're excited to be working with the Yahoo! Search team - they definitely get social systems and their potential to change the web. (We're also excited to be joining our fraternal twin Flickr!)

Congratulations, Joshua. A lot of people still don’t seem to get del.icio.us; I’m glad Yahoo! does. As Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! Search puts it:

And just like we've done with Flickr, we plan to give del.icio.us the resources, support, and room it needs to continue growing the service and community. Finally, don't be surprised if you see My Web and del.icio.us borrow a few ideas from each other in the future.

It’s probably good news for del.icio.us, but there are those who think the touch of Yahoo! isn’t always as light as it could be. For my part I’m smugly totting up the services I’ve tried to champion over the years that have ended up getting bought by Yahoo! There was oddpost; Upcoming; Bloomba; Konfabulator and Flickr. Of course, lots of other people loved these products too, but it’s uncanny how I get excited about something and then Yahoo! wanders in and buys it.

So here are a few other things I like:

• Text Monkey: Easily clean copied text
• blummy: Great bookmarklet aggregator
• MSGTAG - MessageTag: Email receipt alert
• Klips: you got Konfabulator; buy the rest
• Anagram: Translates copied text into Contact, Calendar, Task, and Note items for Outlook, Palm etc
• Multiplicity: Control all your computers from one keyboard n mouse
• TiddlyWikis: they’re not for sale but they’re great
• ActiveWords: Do everything without leaving the keyboard
• 37Signals: The whole Writeboard, Basecamp, Tadalist thing
• Flock: great browser, good way to pull all Yahoo!'s juicy new bits together (thanks, Tom)
• clipmarks: don’t save bookmarks, save clipmarks
• MyInfo: free-form information organizer

Thassall for now.

Tags for Sale to Fund a Wedding

Lame gimmick or wave of the future? Entrepreneur Launches Web's First Tag Directory to Raise Money for His Wedding:

 A Canadian entrepreneur wants to raise funds for his wedding by listing websites on his del.icio.us account for $20 per listing. Patrick Ryan, 37, and his fiancée have been dating for 5 years; he hopes that TagDirectory.net will attract advertisers. Advertisers will be able to list their website under as many categories (tags) as they want.

Ryan hopes to raise $250,000 from the site. So far he’s raised, er, $280, according to the ticker at the top of the directory itself. His initiative has already raised hackles among the del.icio.us community who have questioned, among other things, the size of his wedding.  Turns out he’s hoping to marry in Cuba. That would explain the cost.

It seems a tad lame for several reasons. First off, I don’t really see how the idea would work. Why would anyone visit a paid directory of tags? How do you drive traffic to a site that doesn’t differentiate itself from any other website, except that some advertisers have paid to be there? Secondly, the social web is not about grabbing bucks, especially for a wedding (tsunami/hurricane/earthquake victims, maybe. A quarter of a grand would buy a few cold-weather tents, something I’m sure taggers would be interested in stumping up for. But a wedding?

Thirdly, it raises questions about the vulnerability of such services to manipulation by sleazy marketing types. As one poster to the delicious-discuss users’ group puts it: “It does bring up an important issue, though -- who is to say what constitutes “good” or “bad” tagging behavior,” the poster says. In this case, he says, it's relatively easy because the originator “publicizes his commercial use; but I'm sure there are plenty of guerilla marketing weasels out there who have been doing similar things ever since the service started.” It’s not so much about filtering out the bad ones on an individual basis, but about “the underlying manipulation/distortion of the data for applications like a recommendation or ranking engine.”

Tagging is a great technology and I suppose it would be churlish to abuse someone for trying to make money from it. But we shouldn’t ignore the fact that all those tags are out there because the folk behind these services, and those who tag websites to support them, did it all, initially at least, for free. I wish Patrick Ryan a happy wedding.

Extending Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us has come up with a new Firefox extension which includes toolbar buttons, a menu, context menus and search engine:

Pretty neat, although for some reason my Firefox is behaving and won’t tolerate some popups. More on some alternatives to this in a future post.

Tags for Sale to Fund a Wedding

Lame gimmick or wave of the future? Entrepreneur Launches Web's First Tag Directory to Raise Money for His Wedding:

 A Canadian entrepreneur wants to raise funds for his wedding by listing websites on his del.icio.us account for $20 per listing. Patrick Ryan, 37, and his fiancée have been dating for 5 years; he hopes that TagDirectory.net will attract advertisers. Advertisers will be able to list their website under as many categories (tags) as they want.

Ryan hopes to raise $250,000 from the site. So far he’s raised, er, $280, according to the ticker at the top of the directory itself. His initiative has already raised hackles among the del.icio.us community who have questioned, among other things, the size of his wedding.  Turns out he’s hoping to marry in Cuba. That would explain the cost.

It seems a tad lame for several reasons. First off, I don’t really see how the idea would work. Why would anyone visit a paid directory of tags? How do you drive traffic to a site that doesn’t differentiate itself from any other website, except that some advertisers have paid to be there? Secondly, the social web is not about grabbing bucks, especially for a wedding (tsunami/hurricane/earthquake victims, maybe. A quarter of a grand would buy a few cold-weather tents, something I’m sure taggers would be interested in stumping up for. But a wedding?

But then again, tagging is a great technology and it would be churlish to abuse someone for trying to make money from it. But we shouldn’t ignore the fact that all those tags are out there because the folk behind these services, and those who tag websites to support them, did it all, initially at least, for free. I wish Patrick Ryan a happy wedding.

Getting Communal With Books

It’s always hard to explain to people why sharing stuff online is so powerful. For one thing it’s getting easier, with del.icio.us etc. But the real power is in being able to harness the wisdom of others in finding stuff. Simply put, it’s the online equivalent of asking among your most knowledgeable acquaintances for helping in finding things — from a good barber to a good book, a good CD to a good funeral home. Anyone who has read The Tipping Point will know the importance of mavens (or was it connectors?) so it’s not rocket science that this is an amazing use of the Internet’s leverage. Why some people remain hostile to it baffles me.

Anyway, here’s another great communal sharing thing, written up well by Jim Regan: Do your own LibraryThing | csmonitor.com:

Book clubs and English classes notwithstanding, reading tends to be a predominantly solitary pastime, and truth be told, not many of us have ever considered listing the contents of our 'personal libraries' for either our own or anybody else's entertainment. But the Internet keeps finding new ways of changing our habits, and LibraryThing appears poised to turn the cataloging of books into a form of communal recreation.

Definitely worth a read.

Right on the Board

Another great, simple product from the folks at 37 Signals: Writeboard is live :

Writeboard is a web-based writing tool. It lets you simply write, share, revise, and compare text. With Writeboard you can write solo or collaborate with as many people as you’d like. Writeboard isn’t about heavy text formatting, or WYSIWYG, it’s about the text itself. The words on the page. If you care about design and layout, you’re best bet is to take the finalized text from a writeboard and import it into a page layout program. Make your magic in the right tool.

Nice.

Eventful

EVDB.com, a calendaring whats-on website I mentioned a few months back in a column, has renamed and relaunched itself, as Eventful. A Letter from the CEO explains some of the changes:

Among today's changes, you'll notice lots of new capabilities on the search front. You can now search for events, venues, calendars, and users. We've added a "When" filter so you can see how many events are happening today or at some point in the future, as well as what events have happened in the past.

We've also added the ability for users to connect with other users online: you can mark other users as friends, family, or contacts, and then create events or calendars whose access is limited to just friends, family, or contacts. We've had lots of requests for private events -- here they are!

Nice work, and nice interface. Also includeds iCal and RSS support.

Outlook Gets Del.icio.us

Attensa, an RSS reader for Microsoft Outlook, has added del.icio.us tags:

You can add tags to articles and access them using a pull down list using the Attensa Toolbar for Internet Explorer. When you tag articles with Attensa your bookmark list on Del.icio.us is updated and synchronized automatically. With the addition of tagging, Attensa gives you a set of tools for organizing your feeds and articles. Categories let you create a hierarchal [sic] structure using folders to keep feeds organized. Tags give you a more free form tool for keeping articles organized and they connect you with the del.icio.us social network.

Sadly Attensa only works with Outlook and IE. But it is free.

Social Acrobats

You’ve got social bookmark sharing, photo sharing, now you’ve got social Acrobat file sharing: Yummy! Personal PDF Library.

Yeah, I know it doesn’t sound like much, but it might have its uses. I just can’t think of any right now.

Oh, and it’s brought to you by the guys behind Print(fu), which will turn a PDF file into printed book.

Get off my TiddlyTagCloud

For those of you interested in the whole TiddlyWiki thing, Clint Checketts has just pointed me to his new creation: the TiddlyTagCloud - a simple visualization of active tags, which list the existing tags in a TiddlyWiki alphabetical order and displays the more popular tags larger.

And here, just in case you didn’t see it, is a post on TiddlyWikis I made as a guest blogger on the Blog Business Summit ‘05. Thanks, Byron, for inviting me.

Bringing Tags Offline

I’ve been playing around with EverNote’s latest version and it’s not bad. A very good effort. But why isn’t ‘offline’ software following the tag revolution and allowing users to assign categories on the fly?

EverNote makes much of its getting away from folder hierarchies, and that’s great. But the revolution is only half finished. If you want to add a category you still have to open a dialog box, and assign it to a root folder or subfolder or whatever. I would love to just be able add a tag in the same way I can add a tag to del.icio.us or flickr, or Backpack. Surely this is easy enough to implement?

Or is there another tool out there, outliner or any other note-taking application, that has picked up the tagging baton and run with it for us folks who don’t always want to store and fiddle with our information online. I recall the early version of Enfish Tracker would allow you to add tags to files to improve searching, and ExplorerPlus lets you add notes to files, but neither of these are easy or complete solutions.

Google Earth -- So Impressive, So Depressing

Google Moon is now up and running. Is it only I who finds Google Earth electrifying and yet somewhat depressing, and disturbing?

The idea of being able to zoom into street level is amazing. The technology is extraordinary. Wonderful. It’s one of those moments when you get a real buzz, as if life has just been jolted a yard or two down the track in one second. But now I can’t go outside without thinking how many satellites might be tracking me, or wondering whether there is any place on earth that can’t be visible from space.

It’s awe-inspiring to put little markers in the map and then zoom from one corner of the world to the next, from my family home in the UK to the hotel I’m in in Hong Kong, to the actual rock on Lamma I was sitting on last week. Amazing. But at the same time seeing a journey that takes a day or two reduced to a zippy flyover is somewhat deflating. What happened the mystery of travel? Why travel the globe if you can zip around it on your computer?

The whole zooming out into space and then back is fun, too. But at the same time all it does is remind us how insignificant we are. Little blips. And yet, zooming over the planet from my house to your house also seems to make the planet a lot smaller, and not necessarily in a nice way.

I guess part of me hoped the planet would still be big enough to satisfy a couple more generations’ wanderlust, but now technology is, brilliantly but relentlessly, making everything smaller, easier to find, easier to reach. You’ve got to wonder whether traveler Michael Palin and his ilk (and he still has a few ilks) are a dying breed. Have Google and GPS buried the intrepid explorer?

I hope not.

The Firefox Del.icio.us Toolbar

The guys at del.icio.us have launched a “very preliminary del.icio.us firefox toolbar at http://del.icio.us/toolbar/ :

The button icons are placeholders and a product of Joshua's creative fury. If you bring up the 'customize' toolbar palette in firefox, you can rearrange, remove or place the buttons on on any other customizable firefox toolbar.

The icons are very basic, but somewhat charming. There’s not an awful lot going on, but the ‘about’ button is a useful addition, listing all the other people who have tagged the page you’re viewing.

Directing Del.icio.us

I’m blown away by some of the amazing, but simple, stuff people are doing with tags and Ajax and all these other things I only dimly understand. What’s great is I don’t really need to understand them, I just need to be able to use them and see them as useful.

Here’s yet another candidate: del.icio.us direc.tor: Delivering A High-Performance AJAX Web Service Broker from a guy called Johnvey Hwang:

del.icio.us direc.tor is a prototype for an alternative web-based rich UI for del.icio.us. It leverages the XML and XSL services of modern browsers to deliver a responsive interface for managing user accounts with a large number of records.

The main features are:

* In-browser handling of del.icio.us bookmarks (tested up to 12,000 records)
* Find-as-you-type searching of all your bookmarks, with basic search operators
* Sort by description, tags, or timestamp
* Ad-hoc tag browser

Simple looking, but it does a neat job of enabling you to look through your del.icio.us tags easily. John explains his plan thus:

I have always been intrigued by the idea of using a client-side application to act as a service broker, integrating various services like Google Maps, Flickr, and del.icio.us. Unfortunately, after doing the research, I found that the security blocks in the browser prevent normal untrusted code to poll sites that are not from the same server, so that grand service idea couldn’t be a reality. What I was able to do, though, was provide a service for a single website: del.icio.us.

Part research, part appreciation for del.icio.us, del.icio.us direc.tor is a prototype for an alternative web-based rich UI for del.icio.us. It leverages the XML and XSL services of modern browsers to deliver a responsive interface for managing user accounts with a large number of records. Try it out, and let me know what you think.

Nice.

Searching for Tags

Denis Sinegubko tells me of his new tag searching facility in his software FirstStop WebSearch. Here’s an excerpt from his FirstStop Blog: Social Bookmarks in FirstStop WebSearch which explains it in more detail:

The pre-installed (in version 4.2) category “Social Bookmarks” contains the following search sources: LookSmart's Furl.net, CiteULike.org, and Zniff.com, a search engine for the Spurl.net. Anticipating your question about del.icio.us, I can tell you that we didn’t include this very popular social bookmarks manager only because it doesn’t have a search facility.

Sounds like an interesting tool.

Technorati's New (Beta) Look

Dave Sifry on Technorati Weblog announces a new Public Beta:

I'm pleased to announce the launch of the public beta of this major redesign of the Technorati service. We've been listening to your feedback, and we hope we've reflected that in this release. This is a beta. So, if you have feedback, please tell us because we want to know what is of value to you, our users. We've made a big step with this release. Having said that, we also know we have more improvements to make and we're working hard to implement them. Here are some of the highlights of this beta release:

* We've improved the user experience, making Technorati accessible to more people and, specifically, people who are new to blogging. We've tried to make it very simple to understand what Technorati is all about, and make it easy to understand how we're different from other search engines.
* We've learned from the incredible success of tags, and brought some of the those same features into search, as well as expanding tag functionality. Now, if your search matches a tag, we bring in photos and links from flickr, furl, delicious, and now buzznet as well.
* We now have more powerful advanced search features. You can now click the "Options" link beside any search box for power searching options.
* We've added more personalization. Sign in, and you'll see your current set of watchlists, claimed blogs, and profile info, right on the homepage, giving you quick access to the stuff you want as quickly as possible.
* New Watchlist capabilities have been added. For example, you no longer need a RSS reader to watch your favorite searches. Now you can view all of your favorite searches on one page. Of course, you can still get your watchlists via RSS, and it is even easier to create new watchlists. You can also get RSS feeds for tagged posts, just check the bottom of each page of tag results!

More On Klips

In today’s Asian Wall Street Journal and in WSJ.com (subscription only, I’m afraid) I talk about widgets as an alternative, or addition, to RSS. The two widgets, or dashboards, I look at are Klips, just into version 3, and Konfabulator (I know the latest Mac OS has a dashboard, but I don’t have access to a Mac right now, so I’ll take a look at that later).

Here are some of my favorite Klips:

• Sun Cam: Not a webcam focused on Sun, but on the sun (although it’s throwing up a ‘CDD Bakeout’ message right now)
• CustomWeather: displays seven-day extended forecasts for any one of over 58,000 locations around the world
• Google News: gathers stories from more than 4,500 news sources in English worldwide
• BBC klips: a whole bunch of them, from news to listings
• TeleTrader Index Monitor: as Allan Wille points out in his interview, Europe is more excited about Klips than North America. This one lets you choose from the list of stock indices provided by (German stock website) TeleTrader AG and monitors each of those indices.

Would love to hear from folk who have their own favorites.

Delicious Additions

Here’s a wonderful new addition to the del.icio.us process of adding a tag to a web page — the posting page predicts from your existing tags what you are typing, and offers suggestions based on your existing tags.

Not just that: below the fields are some recommended tags you have already assigned to other pages which match ‘popular tags’ assigned by others to the page being tagged (there’s probably a better way of putting it, but it’s still early here):

Just for good measure the posting page lists all your existing tags, the recommended tags highlighted in red.

Very nice. But not only nice: At a stroke this tackles a couple of perceived problems with del.icio.us: the supposed anarchy of people tagging the same pages with different tags, and the problem of you yourself ending up with too many different, but similar, tags for things that should probably have had the same tags. (There’s bound to be another side to this discussion where people would argue this ‘anarchy’ is part of the greatness of the tagging taxonomy, but I’m not going there this morning.)

Hats off to Joshua and the team. Amazing how simple and intuitive they have managed to keep del.icio.us, where it’s easy to do everything but very hard (at least for me) to explain.

Dvorak Doesn't Like Tagging, Or Bloggers For That Matter

John Dvorak has a go at tagging: To Tag or Not to Tag, That Is the Question

Enter yet another more baffling attempt at tagging. This one is fascinating since it's been gussied up with a new name, and for some unknown reason been given the blessing of a bunch of brain-dead bloggers. This is because a few of the favorite sites that the bloggers love have tacitly approved of the so-called—get this—"folksonomy tags." Oh, a new term! This one is a laugh riot, since there is nothing new here except the new name: Folksonomy. I mean even in HTML there was the "metatag."

No, no. This is different because, uh well, uh, lemme think. It just is!

I love his writing, and I admire his feist, if that’s a word (feistiness doesn’t seem to do justice to him, but feist seems to refer to ‘a nervous belligerent little mongrel dog’ so I better return to feistiness). I disagree with him on tags (I would, I’m a brain-dead blogger) but he makes a good point or two. I’ll leave it to others to pick up the argument, who will do a better job than I, but I was interested in the nearly all positive comments his column received online. Clearly the technorati aren’t popular in all sectors of the city. Is all this blogiverse thing turning into the same elitist, self-referential, self-reverential bunch of blowhards as the folks they’re trying to dislodge? Or as Dvorak puts it:

The influential bloggers should be defined here. These are people whom you've never heard of, but whom other influential A-list utopianist bloggers all know. I reckon there are about 500 of them. He (or she) influences other like-minded bloggers, creating a groupthink form of critical mass, just like atomic fission, as they bounce off each other with repetitive cross-links: trackback links, self-congratulatory links, confirmations, and praise-for-their-genius links. BOOM! You get a formidable explosion—an A-bomb of groupthink. You could get radiation sickness if you happen to be in the area. Except for Wired online and a few media bloggers, nobody is in the area, so nobody outside the groupthink community really cares about any of this. These explosions are generally self-contained and harmless to the environment.

Is this the first salvo in a backlash, or did I miss an earlier fusillade?

 

Backpack Offers Tags

I’m just chatting with Jason Fried of 37Signals, the guys behind Backpack, Ta-da List and Basecamp (which you should check out, if you haven’t already). Jason tells me he has today added tags to Backpack. Here’s a snippet of our conversation (and here’s a movie of it in action):

Jason Fried (37 Signals): Tags are just quick and easy ways for people to categorize their stuff
Jason Fried (37 Signals): I just wrote this FAQ that may help:
Jason Fried (37 Signals): so they're basically just loose categories without rules
Jason Fried (37 Signals): Kind of... Whatever-comes-to-mind categories
JW: do you imagine your tags mixing it up with delicious and flickr tags?
Jason Fried (37 Signals): we'll be releasing a Backpack API in about 30 days or so
Jason Fried (37 Signals): at that point people are free to mix whatever they want. I'm excited to see what the world does with all these tags
Jason Fried (37 Signals): we have some ideas on how to integrate Del.icio.us and Flickr into Backpack, but the API will give tens of thousands of people what they need to come up with their own ideas.

That could be interesting. I asked Jason:

JW: (could you just give some examples of how you imagine people might use tags in BP, and how they might mix them with tags from other services?)
Jason Fried (37 Signals): sure.
Jason Fried (37 Signals): take this page, for example
Jason Fried (37 Signals): this is someone using Backpack as a simple CRM-like tool
Jason Fried (37 Signals): keeping track of call notes for someone, for example
Jason Fried (37 Signals): you might tag this page: eNormcom Client "Phone Notes" April
Jason Fried (37 Signals): then, if you click the April tag you'd see all the other pages you made in April
Jason Fried (37 Signals): or if you clicked the "Phone Notes" tag you'd see all the other pages that have phone notes on them
Jason Fried (37 Signals): Or if you click Client you'll see all the other pages that you've tagged as Client
Jason Fried (37 Signals): As far as other services...
Jason Fried (37 Signals): You might make a page in Backpack like...
Jason Fried (37 Signals): and you might tag that: eTech Conference 2005
Jason Fried (37 Signals): then you might tag some bookmarks at delicious with the same tags
Jason Fried (37 Signals): articles and links that refer to the eTech conference
Jason Fried (37 Signals): reviews, speakers, etc
Jason Fried (37 Signals): then, perhaps, when you click "eTech" inside Backpack, you'd see your Backpack pages tagged eTech *plus* your Delicious bookmarks tagged as eTech
Jason Fried (37 Signals): and maybe your Flickr photos too that you tagged eTech

Lots of potential, I reckon.

On News Visualization, Part III

This week’s Loose Wire column in WSJ is about visualizing news. Researching the column I had a chance to interview Marcos Weskamp, the guy behind the very cool newsmap, who is setting up a studio specializing in interface design and information visualization for the web called B2 inc (no website available yet).

Here’s an edited transcript of our chat:

Jeremy: what are you doing in japan at the moment?
marcos weskamp: well Ive just moved back here. I'm setting up a small interaction design office.
Jeremy: i see... why japan?
marcos weskamp: I had been living here for around 7 years before. I'm originally from argentina, I came under a scholarhip from the japanese government to study graphic design. When I finished I stayed working and so I was until november last year when I moved to italy to do a graduate program in interaction design.
Jeremy: ah i see. could you quickly update me on newsmap? why you did it, what you think it offers over other interfaces, whether you have plans to develop it further, etc?
marcos weskamp: sure
marcos weskamp: newsmap was basically born after I saw googlenews. Again, I'm from argentina, so my mother tongue is spanish, I speak english since I was 5 and I've learned to read and write japanese when I moved here.
marcos weskamp: so when it comes to reading the news, the web is my main source of information and I often read online newspapers in spanish, english or japanese, sometimes reading about the same story in several languages, trying to find what are the nuances that differ from each point of view
marcos weskamp: when googlenews came up I was dazzled, it was impressive. not only they agregated news from thousands of newspapers online, but also - this is the most impressive part - whenever they find the same story in several newspapers, no matter how different the actual text that makes the story is, they group them all under one single cluster
marcos weskamp: so if there's 300 newspapers reporting about, say "Insurgent attacks in Irak" they'll file them all under one group and tell you: theres 1357 articles related to this story now
marcos weskamp: now that particular number was what most interested me. that means if I sumed up the total number of articles, and started making percentages, I could somehow see, which stories where the ones that the media was mostly paying attention to
marcos weskamp: now, in googlenews, today you have a total of 22 countries
marcos weskamp: inside each of them  you'll find 7 categories: world, national, business, sci/tech, sports, enternatinment and health
marcos weskamp: so when I thought about visualizaing all of the articles inside googlenews, I came into treemaps
marcos weskamp: treemaps is a visual layout algorithm developed by Proffessor Ben Shneiderman from the University  of Maryland
marcos weskamp: Treemaps are used to create space constrained visualizations of quantitative hyerarchical data. Shneiderman originally thought about treemaps to visualize the content of his hard disk. If you think about it In your hard disk you have folders that have folders that have folders that have files
marcos weskamp: that structure is hyerarchical, and those files have a quantitative value; the k size of each of them
marcos weskamp: through a treemap then he could easilly find which where the files or folders that where taking the most space in is hard disk
Jeremy: (i've played with a couple such programs, like spacemonger...)
marcos weskamp: in the same way, in googlenews you have countries, that have sections, that have articles. the quantitative value is the ammount of related articles for each news story
marcos weskamp: so I then thought about visualizing the all the content of googlenews in one screen, using a treemap.
marcos weskamp: though I never thought newsmap would replace google news, I simply made it so that I could see, in a quick glance, which where the most important stories at the moment, and also be able then to compare how much attention media in each country gives to each news story
marcos weskamp: what I also found later was well how do different countries look at news. for example if you go to the US, you'll see that most of the times, the US gives more importance to national news than international news
marcos weskamp: all other countries mostly report about international news
marcos weskamp: except italy where you'll find that sports news always takes the most space;)
Jeremy: naturally!
marcos weskamp: in a way you can see how much we are all Biased through US centric media

Jeremy: do you plan to develop it further?
marcos weskamp: yes, definitivelly. I'm working on it:)
Jeremy: what kind of plans do you have?
marcos weskamp: well, I have to add all countries now present in the agreggator. from a data perspective that's no problem. it only means there's more html to process (I'm  not using the google api)
marcos weskamp: but in the front end I need to change the interface a little bit, and also it's tough to display asian characters cleanly in flash without a hughe download. I'm looking into alternatives now. there will be other features like being able to reverse the treemap, so that you can find which stories where burried by the big news.
marcos weskamp: there's also a java version in the works which allows me to display the actual shift of the news throughout the whole week. but well I hope you'll see it when I publish it sometime later

Jeremy: do you see this kind of thing hitting the big time? replacing the way people view their news online ?
marcos weskamp: not really. again I never pretended to replace the aggregator. this is simply a visualization that gives you a different perspective of what's inside googlenews.
marcos weskamp: I like to think about it as a complement to googlenews;)

Thanks, Marcos.
 

On News Visualization, Part II

This week’s Loose Wire column in WSJ is about visualizing news. Researching the column I had a chance to interview Craig Mod, the guy behind the excellent Buzztracker. Here’s an edited transcript of our chat:

Craig Mod: We have over 550,000 articles in the DB now, spanning back to Jan 1st 2004. "Buzztracker" went from 750 hits on google the day before the launch to now ... 39,000+ which was suprising
Jeremy: when was the launch?
Craig Mod: About 3 weeks ago
Craig Mod: got slashdotted within 12 hours
Jeremy: could you walk me thro how you think people might use it, or derive benefit from it?
Craig Mod: sure. the project started about 2 years ago as a pure art project .. some of the original output was just the dots, with no map .. but the closer you looked, suddenly land masses began to emerge and you started forming associations
Craig Mod: I've obviously tried to make it a lot more pragmatic and functional now
Craig Mod: fundamentally it's supposed to get people thinking about why these connections exist -- why is Shanghai and Canada connected (during the SARS outbreaks)?
Craig Mod: How did the virus spread?
Craig Mod: What sorts of checks can you preform to prevent that sort of spreading?
Craig Mod: Is it possible?
Craig Mod: etc etc
Craig Mod: and from there begin to explore how these events are being covered
Jeremy: interesting.. is there a page for the SARS stuff in the archive?
Craig Mod: clicking on the locations obviously gives you a list of the articles they appear in
Craig Mod: unfortunately the SARS stuff happened when I was building the beta 2 years ago .. so it's not in the current DB
Craig Mod: but the recent demonstrations in China have popped up a lot
Craig Mod: there's a China-Tokyo-Jakarta triangle that appeared during the summits
Craig Mod: and you can click the "tomorrow / yesterday" buttons and see just how long these stories linger in the collective media conscience
Craig Mod: which is kind of fun

Jeremy: is there a danger the external links die off?
Craig Mod: There is .. and we orignally had links to our internal cache but .. obvious copyright infringements issues scared us away from keeping the feature on new articles
Craig Mod: although, we still have all the data, of course
Jeremy: yes, the copyright thing is tricky...
Jeremy: how do you plan to deal with that?
Craig Mod: By not publicly offering the articles
Jeremy: right.
Craig Mod: And by keeping advertising off the site .. keeping it as pure an art project / public service project as possible

Jeremy: tell me a bit about you.
Craig Mod: I'm 24
Craig Mod: Born in Hartford, CT
Craig Mod: graduated from UPenn 2 years ago -- degree in Digital Media Design (BSE in Comp. Sci with a very strong Fine arts component)
Craig Mod: Came to Tokyo 4 years ago for a year abroad, came back 1 1/2 years ago to run the Tokyo component of a small publishing company I helped start
Craig Mod: So a total of 2 1/2 years in Tokyo
Craig Mod: 2 years of which was spent at Waseda University in the intensive language program
Jeremy: how's your japanese now?
Craig Mod: Extremely functional but I still can't "relax" with a novel (although I just finished Murakami Ryu's Almost Transparent Blue in Japanese)

Jeremy: so what are your plans for buzz?
Craig Mod: Right now I'm working on re-writing the drawing routines in a more power language .. the plan is to produce super-high-resolution prints for gallery display
Craig Mod: but being the only guy working on this + running sales / pr for CMP in Tokyo means it unfortunately takes a while to rewrite components
Jeremy: when you say hi-res prints, you mean of the maps?
Craig Mod: Correct
Craig Mod: There is a lot of information being lost in the low resolution of comp. screens
Craig Mod: especially Buzztracker connections (the thin, light lines get lost)

Jeremy: with thinking gap donned, where do you see this kind of thing going? do you think as people turn more and more to the net for news, these kind of visual displays will catch on?
Craig Mod: I don't think traditional news delivery will be subverted anytime soon, but I do think that as digitized nformation increases (digital photographs, journals, etc) people are going to need clean, effecient methods to engage with the data / find what they want
Craig Mod: Something like buzztracker is an attempt to both clean up the delivery of a tremendous amount of information while also brining to the surface patterns otherwise invisible -- missing the forest for the trees, etc.
Craig Mod: but what I'm hoping ... what I had in mind as I was designing and building the information structure of buzztracker was that things need to be as clear and simple as possible
Craig Mod: this isn't meant to provide an incredibly exhaustive set of news mining features -- it's meant to be highly accessible by anyone
Craig Mod: I haven't seen any of the other newsmap interfaces but perhaps unlike Marcos' work or, hopefully, mine, their information architecture wasn't as transparent
Jeremy: transparent meaning?
Craig Mod: meaning, they innundated the user with superfluous interface elements, cluttered typography, illogical hierarchies .. I don't want anyone using buzztracker to be concerned with how they engage the software/site .. the focus should, I hope, be engaging the data, the news
Craig Mod: (although I don't know if they did that since I never saw any of them :-) )

Craig Mod: on the tech side of things, there was a point where I was debating between flash and pure html .. in the end, I think going with html made sense for those exact reasons -- quick loading, standards based, etc
Craig Mod: There's also, I suppose (to a small degree) a sense of bias being eliminated in these sorts of ways of navigating the news ..
Jeremy: very true.
Craig Mod: But almost unavoidable .. but those biases are also interesting ..
Craig Mod: buzztracker being completely rooted in anglophone news sources
Craig Mod: you start to see things like .. Africa doesn't exist in the mind of enlgish speaking sources .. most all news takes place on a thin line just above the center of the map

Craig Mod: Animations are also comming .. along side the high-res output ..
Jeremy: how would the animations work? evolution of a story over a period of time?
Craig Mod: you could follow certain keywords -- allowing you to follow certain stories .. You could also map the news on an hourly basis -- interpolating the rise and fall of events smoothly ..
Craig Mod: the thing with the animations is that, I believe, by watching repeated time lapses you'll start to see "news rhythms" erupt ..
Craig Mod: which begs the questions -- if you map these animations to sound, can you decern other patterns that you were missing visually?

Jeremy: what about some of the criticisms that you're leaning towards datelines, and so stuff like the tsunami wasn't represented properly?
Craig Mod: There are some events (like the tsunami) which appear after the day they happened .. one of the best and worst parts of Buzztracker is that it's fully automated so if something doesn't appear when it "should" that's representative of the media in some ways
Craig Mod: The spain explosions last year are incredibly represented
Craig Mod: I think some -- such as false results, or skewed distrobution in the wrong ways -- could be corrected by simple human intervention .. Looking for, spotting these "errors" in calculation, and adding rules to fix them
Craig Mod: but at the same time, that takes away from a bit of the purity of the automation of Buzztracker .. it's always about balance I suppose

Thanks, Craig.

 

On News Visualization, Part I

This week’s column in The Asian Wall Street Journal’s Personal Journal (and online at WSJ.com, subscription only) is about visualizing the news:

To me it's slightly daft that most news Web sites stick to an online format that someone wandering in from the mid-seventeenth century would recognize. Newspapers haven't changed an awful lot in layout since they first appeared. There's good reason for this. But why has the Internet, with all its interactive links, clicking, visuals, sounds and promise of customizing to the individual's needs, not thrown out the newspaper model - headline, pictures, text -- in favor of something better?

Beyond the services mentioned in the text, readers might want to explore some other Web sites that visualize data in different ways:

• AmazType, which uses Amazon’s database to create word-collages of books, DVDs or CDs.
• FlickrLand, a ‘network analysis of the Flickr population, based on data collected on March 14th, 2005’.
• Some cartograms of the U.S. election.
• A map of the week’s news using more traditional tools.
• A wordmap of the day’s main words.
• A slightly similar ‘tag soup’ of Yahoo news.

Meanwhile, as mentioned in the column, there’s a great Web site called information aesthetics which lists a lot of these and similar projects. Anything I’ve missed, please do let me know; I do remember quite a few efforts a few years back, but none of them seem to be active, or offer a public version, anymore.

News, And Tumbling Words

An interesting way of looking at news: 10x10 / 100 Words and Pictures that Define the Time / by Jonathan J. Harris:

Every hour, 10x10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour's most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.

It’s an intriguing, and surprisingly moving, glimpse of world events (especially if you look at something like the tsunami — the pictures, even as thumbnails, are harrowing, and the key words tumble down the right hand side of the screen like billboards at a wake.

It doesn’t help us learn the news very much, but it somehow puts it in perspective. And, with despite the large number of small thumbnails, you somehow know what it is you’re looking at. I don’t want to sound too arty here (too late — Ed) but I’m a fan of anything that makes us see the daily digest of depressing news in a way that cuts through our defences a little.

(Thanks, David. )

Yahoo buys Flickr

Flickr is now part of Yahoo! As CNET reports, Yahoo has bought photo-sharing site Flickr :

Yahoo has purchased online photo-sharing service Flickr, less than a week after the Internet giant launched a beta test of a new blogging tool.

Vancouver, British Columbia-based Flickr lets users upload digital photos from computers and camera phones, put together photo albums, and post photos to blogs, among other things.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens to Flickr. According to a Yahoo spokesperson, Flickr will remain a standalone site for now. The company's employees, however, will relocate to Sunnyvale later this year.

Wired Piece on Tagging

It’s a few days old now, but for those of you who didn’t see it, an interesting overview of tagging from Wired (‘Folksonomies Tap People Power’):

"The job of tags isn't to organize all the world's information into tidy categories," said Stewart Butterfield, one of Flickr's co-founders. "It's to add value to the giant piles of data that are already out there."

The piece also quotes Thomas Vander Wal, coiner of the word ‘folksonomy’, as making a distinction between broad and narrow folksonomies, and how the two are unrelated:

In a broad folksonomy, Vander Wal continued, there is the benefit of the network effect and the power curve because so many people are involved. An example is the website of contemporary design magazine Moco Loco, to which 166 Delicious users had applied the tag "design."

But 44 users had also assigned the URL the tag "architecture," 28 "art," 15 "furniture" and so on. That means that because so many people applied so many different tags to Moco Loco's site, it could be located in a number of different ways.

 

A Directory Of Bookmark Managers

Here’s the beginnings of a directory of social bookmark manager/taglike storage facilities. That’s a mouthful, but the list isn’t:

• furl: The blurb: Save a personal copy of any page on the Web with a single click. Search the full text of your entire archive in an instant. Share what you find through email, RSS or your own site, automatically. See what others are saving and discover new, useful information. Access your archive from any computer, anywhere. It's free to sign up, and quick and easy to install
• del.icio.us The blurb: del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others.
• Spurl The blurb: Spurl.net is a free on-line bookmarking service and search engine. It allows you to store and quickly access again all the interesting pages you find on the web from any Internet connected computer.
• Spurlbar The blurb: The spurlbar is an extension for FireFox, which lets you to use spurl.net bookmarking service easily.
• flickr The blurb: almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.
• Simpy The blurb: social bookmarking and personal search engine
• StumbleUpon The blurb: a network of people and pages. It is a free tool which helps you browse, review and share webpages while meeting new people.
• Powermarks The blurb: Bookmark Manager and Personal Search Engine
• Netvouz
• FavoritesFinder

As ever, suggestions for more gratefully received.

The Tag Report IV: A Chat With Joshua

Here’s a chat I had with Joshua Schachter, creator of del.icio.us:

JW: ok good. shouldn't take long. i just wanted to find out a bit about you, your motivation for setting up delicious, and the evolution of the tagging thing...
Joshua: yes, it's totally exploding recently
Joshua: The short version: I started a website in 1998 or so; that kind of thing would later get named a "blog"
Joshua: Anyway, in the running of this site, I collected a lot of links so I could hopefully organize and post them.
Joshua: So I started keeping them in a file, which grew and grew. To be able to quickly find things, I started leaving one-word notes at the end.
Joshua: Tags.
Joshua: I later built a system, around 2002, that was a web-based database for storing my bookmarks.
Joshua: It also had tags, but was not multiuser.
Joshua: I'm not sure if it was 2002 or 2001, anyway. It first shows up in archive.org at 2002 though.
Joshua: Then later, I rewrote it multiuser, as del.icio.us.
Joshua: That was 2003 or so.
JW: (any reason you chose the name and the punctuation?)
Joshua: So the motivation was mostly because I was solving a problem I had, and then I solved it for everyone.
Joshua: I chose the domain before I had the idea.
JW: ah right...
Joshua: When .us became available, I just registered a few funny items
Joshua: the previous system was called muxway. In retrospect, I should have kept that name.
JW: really? why do you prefer that?
Joshua: Easier to figure out where the dots go
Joshua: http://web.archive.org/web/20020525043925/http://muxway.org/
JW: true! the dots can be a problem :-)
Joshua: up through about http://web.archive.org/web/20031212140024/http://www.muxway.org/
JW: how did delicious get to be so popular? was that a surprise?
Joshua: Not really. The concept is very attractive both to use, as it solves your problem, and it lets you discover lots of interesting things from other people.
JW: how many users do you have now? and how many tags?
Joshua: fifty thousand or so users. Lots and lots of tags
JW: what's the growth like?
Joshua: Insane
JW: any figures?
Joshua: Oh, I haven't looked at the numbers a lot. Not a good thing to focus on.
Joshua: Last I looked it was growing by 20-30% a month, but I haven't looked in a bit.
Joshua: I assume it has tapered off a bit, just because of the growth pains.
Joshua: Call it 15% growth a month?
JW: is it a lot of work for you?
Joshua: 15% looks low, just back of the envelope
Joshua: It's as much work as I let it be
Joshua: There's always stuff to do, new features and ideas and so on.
Joshua: I've really only gotten started.
JW: is it a fulltime job for you? if not, what is your job?
JW: and age?
Joshua: I'm 30
Joshua: Definitely not a fulltime job
Joshua: I'm not too sure what to say about my day job. I work in an unrelated field
JW: do you intend to make some money out of it at some point? or are you already?
Joshua: I haven't worried about it yet.
Joshua: I did it for fun and because it's interesting.
JW: i see... what's your view of the technorati move on delicious and flickr tags? is this an important step?
Joshua: flickr is much more like delicious. It's a way to organize your data in a way that is very useful to the user.
Joshua: when i built delicious, i designed it so that it would be useful to me, even if not a single other person joined in.
Joshua: Flickr is similar.
Joshua: If nobody else was using it, I'd still find the site useful
Joshua: The challenge here is to understand how they are different from search, what motivates people to use them.
Joshua: Well, they're sort of in opposite directions of each other. Mirrors
JW: could you elaborate?
Joshua: Hard to explain; I'm really still thinking about the problem.
Joshua: Basically, the way I think of the what I'm doing
Joshua: is taking the process of memory, and building prosthetics.
Joshua: I want to split storing and recalling into two separate actions with the help of the computer, so that when you tag things you store, you can recall them more easily
Joshua: In doing so, I have also made it easier for you to recall things that other people have stored.
Joshua: Tags facilitate and amplify this.
Joshua: Search is more associated with the recall, whereas tagging is more associated with the storage.
Joshua: Does that make sense?
JW: yes it does. v well put.

Thanks, Joshua.

The Tag Report I: A Chat With Gen Kanai

In today's column (subscription required) for WSJ.com and The Asian Wall Street Journal's Personal Journal section I write about tags -- the kind found on del.icio.us and Flickr. I spoke -- or at least IMed -- with some interesting people to research the story, and thought I'd post excerpts from some of the chats, with the permission of the source, in case anyone is interested in reading more.

Here's the first one, from Japanese American Tokyo resident Gen Kanai who was very good at walking me through some of the ideas about tagging. He declined to let me identify his own current involvement, but it sounds interesting indeed. Hopefully we can talk more about that later.

JW: i was playing around with delicious and started reading stuff, including your posts on it, and was trying to see where it's all going...
Gen Kanai: Its definitely been the hot topic of the past few weeks.
JW: from what i've read this is all about metadata, and making it so it's not just personal categories, but sharing... is that anywhere near?
Gen Kanai: yes, the key is the sharing aspect.
Gen Kanai: as we all know, people are lazy,
Gen Kanai: so a little bit of investment up-front in tagging (photos, a url, etc.) means you can find a lot more related information afterwards
JW: ok...
Gen Kanai: especially when web services start sharing that data
JW: what's in it for web services to share this stuff?
Gen Kanai: good question
Gen Kanai: More readership, a greater audience
JW: could you give an example?
Gen Kanai: sure.
Gen Kanai: if delicious was merely a bookmark saving service, it wouldnt be interesting.
Gen Kanai: delicious is compelling because the users save the bookmark but also associate metadata in the form of tags with each URL.
Gen Kanai: that "tag" is then automatically associated with other "tags" and so one can find other URLs related to "ferrari"
JW: how would that work exactly? if someone gave a tag 'car' and another 'roadhog' would they be matched? or lost?
Gen Kanai: or whatever keyword or phrase.
Gen Kanai: The other important part
Gen Kanai: is that both Flickr and Delicious have APIs for sharing.
Gen Kanai: Application programming interfaces.
Gen Kanai: a simple way for the data (Photos or URLs) to be shared on other websites.
Gen Kanai: Amazon also has an API for their system
JW: for sharing book lists etc?
Gen Kanai: its one important way Amazon is more successful than other Ecommerce sites
Gen Kanai: yes.
Gen Kanai: on sites OTHER than amazon.
Gen Kanai: but getting back to tags
JW: ok, i'm with you. still not sure how the tags work if they are just keywords assigned by individuals. how do they get matched up?
Gen Kanai: its all very serendipitous and chaotic
Gen Kanai: at the same time.
Gen Kanai: librarians would have a fit.
JW: heh...
Gen Kanai: anyway, the other key is that "tags" are user generated.
Gen Kanai: it doesnt sound like a big deal, but it is.
Gen Kanai: because in the past, with XML, for instance
Gen Kanai: there was a need to make agreements across industries to standardize
Gen Kanai: and that's all thrown out the window with tags
JW: ok...
Gen Kanai: basically its a way to find other similar information
Gen Kanai: the user does a bit more work tagging, but it results in a wealth of information once the tagged information is cataloged and associated with other data that has the same tag.
Gen Kanai: I would say, however, that this is all VERY new, and no one is really sure what this means in the long run.
Gen Kanai: Whether it will scale.
Gen Kanai: etc.
JW: ok. i'm still a bit clueless how the serendipitous tagging works: if my idea of tagging and yours don't gel, won't that be duplicated effort?
Gen Kanai: that:s ok
Gen Kanai: it doesnt have to gel
Gen Kanai: it not a perfect system
Gen Kanai: but so far, when used, it works well enough that people are excited and more and more sites are implementing tags as a feature
Gen Kanai: the best sites have APIs so they can share that information with other sites...

Thanks, Gen, for walking me through it. I'll post some more chats soon.

Lucian George, Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia

Into this debate about the reliability of Wikipedia leaps the 12–year old figure of Lucian George from north London, who found five errors in the latest edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. BBC reports that

A schoolboy has uncovered several mistakes in the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica - regarded by readers as an authority on everything. Lucian George, 12, from north London, found five errors on two of his favourite subjects - central Europe and wildlife - and wrote to complain. The book's editor wrote back thanking him for "pointing out several errors and misleading statements".
A Britannica spokesman said the company was "grateful".

His father, Gabriel George, told BBC News: "Lucian told me he had found a mistake. Then, a few days later, he found another. Then there was another. "By the time he had found five, I said to him that he should write to the editors to complain about it."

So what did he find?

• Chotyn, in which two battles between the Poles and the Ottoman Empire were fought, is said to lie in Moldova. (It’s not, it’s in Ukraine.)
• The Polish part of the Belovezhskaya Forest, according to the encyclopaedia, lies in the Bialystok, Suwalki and Lomza provinces. (Suwalki and Lomza provinces have not existed since 1998. And, even when they did, the whole Polish section of the forest - which extends into Belarus - was in Bialystok, the BBC reports.)
• The terrain of the European bison: Poland, according to the encylcopedia. (Actually it encompassed parts of Russia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Slovakia and Belarus - not just Poland.)

Of course, errors in the Britannica are nothing new (here’s a list from one guy alone). And I’m no Lucian George but (that’s what we’re going to say from now on, isn’t it? ‘I’m no Lucian George, but isn’t that use of the semi-colon incorrect?’) I’ve spotted a few errors in my time in both the Britannica and Encarta. (If one 12–year old can find five, how many more errors must there be in there?) But maybe we shouldn’t be so apologetic about Wikipedia’s eccentricities and errors when we realise that no single encyclopedia can get it right? The academics who do these entries are, after all, just academics, and probably don’t have time to have any peer review of their entries.

In a way Wikipedia is like having dozens of Lucian Georges looking over your shoulder when you amend or add an entry, which may end up being a better way of keeping out errors. Not least, of course, an error in Wikipedia will get fixed on the spot, but how many copies of EB are going to sit on shelves, riddled with mislocated East European data, for years to come, misleading the public and irritating the good burghers of Chotyn?

The Tag Report III: Bowen Dwelle

Here’s a chat I had with Bowen Dwelle on tagging.

JW: i just wanted to get my brain around your tag posting, and get your views on the broader tagging (r)evolution.
...
Bowen: I attempted some sort of explanation of this in this post:
Bowen: said again, there are several ways to classify information -- human top down (Dewey, DMOZ, old Yahoo directory), machine "AI", machine brute force (Google), etc. Brute force is great, but doesn't allow the human value-add and the power to social networking to take effect...
JW: yeah, that's well put...
Bowen: Top-down categorization breaks down almost immediately. I used to build search engines and such (HotBot), and I never thought that directories were very interesting at all. Think about how confusing the yellow pages is because you don't know where to find Restaurant, Supplies, Retail - ugh.
Bowen: So even though there is some built-in level of "error" in tags (mis-spellings, synonyms, etc), in aggregate the social network adds more meaning than it costs in terms of effort.
JW: where do you see it going?
Bowen: As illustrated by my own crude efforts on my blog, I think that a "tag" centric view of one's own online world is a useful one. The number of recent tools that have emerged that leverage the tag metaphor shows that people get it.
Bowen: Technorati, Flickr, delicious, etc
Bowen: Some are pointing to Google's nofollow
Bowen: "nofollow" thing as a "tag" - although I don't think it's quite the same
JW: that's just a way to cut comment spam from page rankings, no?
Bowen: right.
Bowen: but gmail does tags...
JW: that's true.
Bowen: basically, the idea of having some mechanism to tie various axes of data (email, links, photos, etc) together, and then being able to pivot on those axes is very useful
Bowen: it gives people a comprehensible way to link things together
Bowen: and, most importantly, it gives people a way to link to other people, and -- potentially -- to be grouped together..

Thanks, Bowen.

The Tag Report II: Some Links

There’s lots to read on tagging, but here are some interesting places to start:

Here’s an interesting IM chat with Joshua Schachter, who amused me immensely by begging me not to give too much publicity to his deli.cio.us website because his servers couldn’t handle all the traffic following any media mention. My brief IM chat with him will follow soon. I also chatted with Bowen Welle — that chat will appear soon, I hope — but here’s one post that drew me to seek him out.

Here’s Wikipedia’s definition of Folksonomy, which points out, inter alia, that “Folksonomies work best when a number of users all describe the same piece of information. For instance, on del.icio.us, many people have bookmarked wikipedia, each with a different set of words to describe it. Among the various tags used, del.icio.us shows that reference, wiki, and encyclopedia are the most popular.”

Talking of Wikipedia, the lively discussion on Many 2 Many has recently tackled the whole issue of Folksonomy, and of whether Wikipedia needs supervision. Louis Rosenfeld worries about folksonomies getting out of hand. Another, earlier, look at the same issues from Peter Merholz, and HeadShift, and Alex Wright, and the Laughing Meme.

I’ll try to keep adding links to my deli.cio.us taglist. Please do let me know of any other interesting links: This is really just a smattering of what is out there on what I hope is is a growing topic.