Library clips

Yahoo! is now in the folksonomy game, with their release of My Web 2.0.

Here is the home page and tag cloud.

They have an excellent FAQ.

From reading the FAQ it seems like it is a combination of Furl and del.icio.us, best of both social tools.

I use both Furl and del.icio.us as they have unique features, I suppose if del.icio.us searched full-text, then I would go full-time

…I must try Spurl as it seems to have really usable features.

Although it would be logical to use My Web 2.0, I prefer to stick to the pioneers as I have more in common with the interests of the user base.

It seems that all these tools are maturing, and new tools are entering with all the required features, so now it’s becoming a factor of using the tool where the user base suits your interests.
…or a tool that is for a specific purpose or has a unique feature.

Examples
Yummy (social bookmarks for PDF)
Connotea (user base and features are more scientific)
CiteULike (user base and features are more academic)
43 things (wishlist)
Flickr (photos)
…and so on

ReBlg not to be confused with reBlog (one-click re-posting [with an automated reference - to avoid copyright issues] from you RSS reader to your blog), is a new tool in development that claims to be a universal Blog This! button.

From their post:

“Tired of being forced to use only the latest tool or utility to take advantage of a new standard – wish you could use ANY tool or utility instead?” - where’s a routing service to enable me to send posts to whatever tool I chose?….

“ReBlg.com would enable end-users to register their favorite tool of choice so that wherever they traveled on the web, by simply clicking on the ‘ReBlg’ button – they could easily send that post to their favorite tool. If the end-user doesn’t want to rely upon our web service, then they can simply download a MIME handler to do that routing for them.”

This is what I’ve been looking around for, I wonder if it would work like the print button, or discuss button on the IE browser

…where exactly does this button sit, maybe I should ask the people at Reblg.

I wonder how it would handle frames, that is, if you want to send an entry from your RSS reader to somewhere…when you hit the button how will it know which entry from the many in your RSS reader you want to send.
(that’s why I find right-click action very useful)

Some previous posts on this functionality:

Connecting my Blog, Aggregator, and Bookmarks
Blog post utilities!
Tagophilia for every blog entry

This is a shout out to all!

I’m wanting to find out if there are any enterprise folksonomy packages…all the social bookmark managers I’ve used are web-based.

Basically we want a social bookmark manager installed on our server and restricted to our staff…also something we can customise to suit our Intranet.

I’m aware a few bookmark managers allow you to create groups, and I know we can make Furl private and everyone can share the log-in, but we want to customise (put a our logo) and have the security (even though I know Furl will always be around) by installing it on our server.

Even better, is there a system where everyone has their own account, contributing to the folksonomy (homepage), but the contributors are only the staff at our company?

Instead of being for the whole web contributing to the folksonomy, it is just restricted to our staff.

I would test it out on just one business unit, if it worked fine, then we could maybe make groups within the folksonomy, for all the business units.

In comparison

Web

• Contributors - anyone with an account
• Groups - anyone with an account that is in a group

Enterprise

• Contributors - restricted to staff
• Groups - business units

So the master home page would have the aggregated folksonomy of all the business units (groups)

The business units (groups) would have their own home page (folksonomy)

Also able to browse tag clouds by group or all groups together in one giant cloud…as well as browse a tag set.

Search

• full-text
• title field
• tag field
• within a group
• within whole folksonomy

Even better would be to enable bookmarking of other file types, such as doc, xls, pdf, etc..

Once the system is up and running, I will see how the tags pan out (educating people on tag ettiquette…and moderating the tags by fixing mistakes, plurals, synonyms, acronyms…then re-educating people about these moderations, eg. please use New York and not NY)

…maybe we could make the system smart, so if someone types in NY a prompt will come up saying please use New York (this would be kind of like a synonym ring or rule set)

Now that takes care of appropriate tags when bookmarking, what about when browsing.

Well if someone types in NY, the result should be empty, but there should be a note that reads, please use New York.

After a while we can see how well the emerging vocabulary evolves, and if we need to turn it into some sort of hybrid system where some tags are not allowed (please choose another tag from this list or suggest a tag to the administrator)…and if namespaces or a a type of taxonomy is required.

The following comments on this post are very insightful.

Here is an excerpt of one comment:

“…I predict that these concepts will continue to grow in popularity because people want to organize information. However, they will paint themselves into a corner and the only way out is through the transformation of tagging schemes into ontologies. Don’t get me wrong - I think these early tagging systems are useful because they will educate us to the requirements beyond the near horizon and just how low the ceiling is for emergent (taxonomy-based) tagging.

As such, I predict that from a broad and divergent set of terms will emerge groups that create ontological overlays (see XTM 1.0) of agreed-open definitions. I suspect these groups will form around a domain of expertise and a desire to eliminate chaos created by ground-up taxonomies. This scenario requires the availability of tagging API’s that allow a higher-order architecture to emerge.”

Also this post speculates on the processes.

An excerpt from the post:

“…could tag new and existing content in an unrestricted manner for a set period of time. At the cut-off point, the tags would be analysed for popularity and similarity (synonyms, misspellings etc.), and a reduced set then used for an open (card) sort. The results of this could be analysed and transferred into a first iteration of a taxonomy, along set rules.
The taxonomy could then be exposed to the search engine and CMS - authors would now tag their content using the taxonomy, and, for ongoing maintenance would still have the option for creating a new tag. New tags could be processed by the taxonmomist and added/amended to the overall classification as necessary. I’m not sure whether this would work in practice, but it might be the outline of using rapid, distributed categorisation to move to a stable classification, and it would certainly reflect a consensus opinion…”

Now if there was a system I could start trialing!

Third time lucky, this post is clarifying some points on two earlier posts:

Subscribe to a blog via the RSS engines??
Findory version of your blog

Greg Linden from Findory pointed out in a comment, that even though Findory does have a page to read the latest posts from your blog, the feed that is generated is not a feed for your blog but instead a feed for related articles to your blog.

This is the only RSS engine, as far as I know, that generates an RSS feed for related articles…very unique!

At the bottom of the page next to the RSS feed, they have an icon called “NEWS INLINE”…this is basically a javascript box to put on your blog sidebar to show related articles.

OPML editor sounds like a tool we’ve been waiting for a long time…now we just have to wait for its release.

Do all your RSS feed manipulating in the one tool, creating your own versions of your OPML…make topic guides with the ease of selecting the feeds to be included, something that was fiddly for Technogeekery on an earlier post.

…from the website:

“Its native file format is OPML, the standard format for lists of RSS feed
subscriptions. So you can use the OPML Editor to open and edit subscription
lists for all the major feed readers and aggregators, tune them up, merge
them and split them, publish and share them. Finally, there’s a rational way
to edit the subscription lists.”