Lee Iverson

Thomas Vander Wal on Folksonomy

Wed, 29 Mar 2006 10:43:44 -0800

In Online Information Folksonomy Presentation Posted :: Personal InfoCloud Thomas Vander Wal writes about tagging, folksonomy and taxonomy and rightly points out that they are not necessarily opposed or incompatible concepts. I'd go further than him though to suggest that they are, in fact, quite compatible.

Thu, 16 Mar 2006 16:09:27 -0800

In Lowering Barriers to Participation, Bradley Horowitz points out how tagging lowers the barriers to participation and thus allows ordinary users to create useful metadata. I think he's right on here. Especially on a system such as del.icio.us, the ease of use and triviality of creating tags allows pretty much anyone to create "personally useful" metadata. As an aide memoire, that is exactly what it should allow.

Is it authoritative? Is it useful for others? That's for someone else to decide. It's easy and useful for me, and if there are natural concordances with others, I can take advantage of those. That should be enough, and is.

My Favourite Cafe: The Beanery

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 22:01:21 -0800

My favourite little cafe is a place called "The Beanery" on the UBC campus in the middle of the Fairview residences. Sonny and Sonya, who run the place, are two wonderful friendly hosts, the atmosphere is great, and UBC wireless is usually available. It's my second office.

It's located inside the Fairview residences. The entrance to the residences is at the intersection of Fairview Ave. and Western Parkway. There's a sign there for the Beanery, but it is actually all the way in the back of the residence complex, near Pearkes Lane.

EXTENT

How to Write a Proposal

Fri, 24 Feb 2006 16:01:42 -0800

I've been asked repeatedly by students and others for advice on writing a proposal document. As with all documents, I believe that the best way to go about this is to concentrate on two things: the audience and the goal of the document. In general, a proposal is written to someone who has the ability to allow you to do something (i.e. money, resources, supervision) and your goal is to convince them to enable or allow you to do it. With that in mind, we can come up with a few guidelines.

Trying out Elgg

Fri, 24 Feb 2006 14:46:35 -0800

Lee Iverson :: Blog is my new blog on http://elgg.net, an ePortfolio system. I'm using it for my CSCW course EECE 519. I chose it because of the combination of blogging, tagging, selective sharing, and community definition and maintenance. I also have a student studying information sharing behaviours in a community of Elgg users. Let you know how I like it.

Tagging and Attribution

Mon, 06 Feb 2006 11:32:25 -0800

A simple, but important point about tagging. If a social tag is unattributed, then it is next to useless. Think of "I tag Obj with tag" as an assertion that Obj "means" tag to me (whatever tag means to me). If this is done in a social environment, then without attribution and some ability to assess the meaning or trustworthiness of my tags (from your own perspective), the information that Obj has been tagged is problematic.

Del.icio.us vs Google

Mon, 06 Feb 2006 11:06:50 -0800

In A social analysis of tagging, Rashmi Sinha makes a few interesting points about the transition from solitary to social with the tagging experience. I tend to agree with this, but I would like to point out a few things I think deserve more consideration.

del.icio.us and Recommended Tags

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 14:55:04 -0800

On the weekend at TagCamp, I made a few points about the possibilities of del.icio.us and Flock for bootstrapping the development of rich, personal ontological models. In that framework, I made some unfounded criticisms of current del.icio.us practice that I should correct publically.

Yahoo 360 and Lucasfilms' Habitat

Tue, 05 Apr 2005 14:15:14 -0800

Reading Yahoo! 360 through "The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat". A great little article with another great little article in a link. Well worth the read.

Intermediation, REST & Bookmarking

Fri, 01 Apr 2005 10:54:11 -0800

In The architecture of intermediation, Jon Udell suggests that there might not have been the need to "clone" del.icio.us (see de.lirio.us) in order to be able to experiment with the structure and services. He suggests instead the with the proper "intermediation" in terms of proxies etc. there should be ways to do things with del.icio.us that the designers haven't anticipated.

What is a Facet?

Fri, 18 Mar 2005 11:38:52 -0800

Nils Soren Peterson in Semantic Tagging, an extension to a Group's Thesaurus asks "what is a facet?" in the context of an experiment being by Haiko Hebig with his del.icio.us tags.

Controlled Vocabularies Cut Off the Long Tail

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 11:12:51 -0800

Bokardo � Controlled Vocabularies Cut Off the Long Tail makes a couple of important observations relating folksonomy to controlled vocabularies (e.g. domain ontologies). In particular he contrasts:

Discovery vs. Finding, or what I would term browsing vs. search.
Tracking vs. Prediction, although he doesn't quite abstract it in those terms.

In general, I agree with much of what he's pointed out, but I think he misses a few important aspects of the problem or generalizations of these observations.

Do Tags Work?

Mon, 07 Mar 2005 14:02:22 -0800

In ongoing � Do Tags Work?, Tim Bray asks whether tagging systems such as Technorati or del.icio.us work? He suggested a simple piece of research that might find out...

Seb's Social Software Challenge

Wed, 02 Mar 2005 23:18:30 -0800

Seb's Open Research describes a "Programming Challenge" to count links in deli.cio.us topics. There's some hope there, but I think we need to go in a different direction.

Hunter S Thompson and Qualitative Research

Sat, 26 Feb 2005 08:10:15 -0800

ongoing � HST is a good start on some Hunter S. Thompson reflections. I must admit, I have read little of his stuff and my clearest image of him is Doonesbury's Uncle Duke, but a few things that I heard people saying about him ran true, and I made an observation in my CSCW class on Tuesday that I'd like to share.