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March 29, 2006

Thomas Vander Wal on Folksonomy

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.

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February 06, 2006

Tagging and Attribution

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.

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Del.icio.us vs Google

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.

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Posted by Lee Iverson at 11:06 AM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

November 02, 2005

del.icio.us and Recommended Tags

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.

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March 18, 2005

What is a Facet?

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.

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March 17, 2005

Controlled Vocabularies Cut Off the Long Tail

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.

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Posted by Lee Iverson at 11:12 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

March 07, 2005

Do Tags Work?

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...

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March 02, 2005

Seb's Social Software Challenge

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.

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February 20, 2005

The Four Pillars of KM

It came to me in conversation at the Northern Voice conference yesterday that a very simple way to understand the problems of personal/group/organizational Knowledge Management (KM) is through four pillars: Discovery, Use, Organization, and Sharing.

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