Library clips

Well a while back I was posting about a folksonomy for notes…and basically this would be blogs within a folksonomy environment.

The blogs would look generic as they are part of a community portal, like del.icio.us, but they would have permalinks, comments, trackbacks…so they would have the basic functions of a normal blog, but the presentation would be homogenous, and the major difference is that every post would be tagged (as normal blogs have categories) and shared within the general tag cloud, and system features for discovery.

So imagine a system like del.icio.us, but you don’t have to be bookmarking a page in order to make an entry, you can simply just decide to post some text without having to link to something…so it isn’t a folksonomy for social bookmarks, but a folksonomy for notes or text or posts…as mentioned above if each user had permalinks, trackbacks and comments for every post this would be this exact system I’m describing (a blogsonomy or a notesonomy).

A new folksonomy called TagFacts has nearly achieved this although it lacks permalinks and trackbacks…nonetheless it is great to see a “folksonomy for text” (notesonomy) at last.

This can be also used as a link blog, but is more like a normal blog, because instead of adding an annotation to a link, like you do in del.icio.us, you are moreso adding a link to supplement your text - or you don’t have to add a link at all.

It seems it is at the early stages yet, but we can imagine the feature set to come as it is by the same person that brought you Reader2, and MyProgs.

Other “folksonomy for text” (notesonomy) are Tagifieds (although this is not really for notes, it is a more of a bulletin board, but I mentioned it as you can just post text, without having to link to something), same with Num Sum (for spreadsheets)
…and also TagSurf, although this is more forum based…so it seems TagFacts is the first folksonomy for notes.

It seems to do for it’s own community what Technorati Tags does for the blogosphere, ie. aggregate tags for blog posts (in this case the post is text/note)…but TagFacts does this for its registered community, and it does more than just aggregate tags, it is a folksonomy.

Here is my user account for a look at a post.

Gee, these virtual desktops are becoming popular…Fyuze is another to add to the list (although this is focused on just feed content).

It’s basically a place to see all your feeds displayed on a page, you can even discover feeds to add by searching from from various services from within Fyuze itself.

Most bloggers are familiar with re-syndicating a feed into a small javascript box that sits in the sidebar of your blog, well now you can re-syndicate heaps of those boxes and display them on a page
…and you are not only limited to one page, you can make tabs for other pages.

So you could grab your 10 favourite blog feeds about “sustainability” and display them on a page, then tab to another page with 10 keyword search feeds for “sustainability” from various services (eg. news engines, bookmarks services, RSS engines, etc…)…or make each page a different topic.

This is a great way to display feeds and their content in a portal type fashion for easy viewing…kind of reminds me of setting up a topic based Blogdigger group or Public Bloglines account, but instead of a stream of news like a Blogdigger group, Fyuze enables to view content (in boxes) by source…you can also do this in a Blogdigger group by just filtering contents from one feed, but with Fyuze you can see content from various feeds at the same time on the one screen (each hosted in a box).

Now I’m not sure if your account is viewable by others, but this would be a good idea as you can only fit so many boxes on the sidebar of your blog.

Also it could act as a snap shot of your web 2.0 profile, ie. include feeds from all your web 2.0 accounts all on the one page for people to see.

An RSS feed for each page and for the whole account would also be great, kind of like how Google News Customised has an RSS feed for the whole account.

Actually this kind of reminds me what Feeeds did a while back, and something else I posted about called Fuzzy Newsmastering…this tool also allows you to create RSS radars by splicing and filtering feeds, but unlike Fyuze there lacks an inbuilt facility to find feeds.

First it was reading feeds in your personal RSS Reader, of late there are an increasing amount of applications or ways to display feeds in a public page, some like Personal Bee even add intelligent indexing…even more than TagCloud.

[via Solution Watch]

fac.etio.us groups tags into facets, so you can find a bookmark via multiple paths, naturally you can do this sort of thing with tagging as you can apply multiple tags to the one bookmark, but this system divides batches of tags into facets…it’s the next best thing to a prefix for tags.

So now instead of browsing through one long list of tags, a tag set is divided into facets to give you more contextual browsing

…but this system doesn’t seem anything new, because if you wanted you could use tag bundles to make facets in your del.icio.us account…although what this system does is aggregate many accounts, and groups tags into facets.

Now I wonder how the tags are grouped into facets, is this done by a computer or is it a person placing tags in groups (facets)…ohhh no controlling the browsing of a folksonomy, this was bound to happen as our tag sets grow wildly…actually I see it more as an offer to browse another way (more contextually).

This process could be automated into system designed facets quite easily for a tool like del.icio.us…for each bookmark, you could also choose from a drop down menu to describe the document type as CiteULike does, eg, journal article, conference, thesis, etc…this would be like an automated facet for the bookmark in general.

This does create more work for the user, but at least the system is still a pure folksonomy…also users are selecting from the facet list, who decides the facet list…is there a facet suggestion list?

I like this idea as the tags people apply are generally more “subject/topic based”, so to separate these from other functional or descriptive tags we could choose from various drop-down menu’s to apply the other types of tags…this leaves the tag list to be subject/topic based.

So if I bookmark a page in del.icio.us on “sustainability” I can give it the tag “sustainability” and “sustainabledevelopment”, etc…but at the same time for a little extra work I can also select some options from 4 or 5 drop-down menu’s, this isn’t too much thinking, you just have to select from the options.

So, similar to the CiteULike approach, there could be the following fields (just fill in what you need to):

Automated facets by the system

DOCTYPE
doc
xls
html
xml
pdf
ppt
etc…

DOMAIN
gov
org
com
edu
etc…

DATE

USER/CONTRIBUTOR

For the bookmark

FORMAT (choose one or none from the following)
Journal article
White paper
Conference
Blog post
Website
Product
Type in your own
etc…

ACTION
to read
to blog
need access
to buy
to send
Type in your own
etc…

GEO
various countries…

ORG
various organisations…

Example

So if I have a pdf of a white paper on energy efficiency (sustainable practice) from a firm in Australia, and I want to blog about it, here is the tagging process.

USER-DEFINED TAGS (subject tags)
- energy
- sustainabledevelopent
- sustainability

AUTOMATED SYSTEM TAGS FOR THE BOOKMARK
- pdf
- org
- 20/09/05
- johnt

USER-SELECTED BOOKMARK FIELDS (drop-down menu) FOR NON-SUBJECT TAGS
- White paper
- to blog
- Australia
- Organisation name

What about subject facets?

The tags applied by the user, as per usual, are now considered the “subject tags” (eg. sustainability, etc.)…but then how do we make facets out of these?
eg. genre, technology, attribute, etc…
…a drop down menu for a subject facet just couldn’t cover the scope, although you could give a choice, and a space to type your own.
When thinking of applying a subject facet to your tag, it would be like thinking of which broad category/discipline this tag would come under…in some circumstances the facet name could be the same as your tag name, eg. politics.

Then you could browse del.icio.us by these facets…or at least you could make up these facets for your own account (that means you would have to customise the fields in your bookmarklet)

For more see:
Siderean - Trees, tags and facets
Facets + Tags

Another way of having automated tag bundles is having a pre-fix for a tag (tag for the tag)…the other day I posted about doing this manually in del.icio.us..
Wists has this feature (a form of meta-tagging, they call themes)…in this sense your tag bundles or facets could automatically be created by the pre-fix heading, although I also the like the option to also make your own weird and wonderful tag bundles.

see more…

[ADDED 23/09/05: Furl lets you check the boxes read or unread at the time of bookmarking…so later on you can sort your archive by read or unread.
This has an added handiness, as at the time of bookmarking you may not have read the webpage you are bookmarking, so you can’t really fill in the comments/description field…later on once you have read the webpage, you can check it as “read” and also add a comment.]

[ADDED 3/10/05: Faceted Folksonomy]