Library clips

Yesterday I posted about using facets or automated tags within del.icio.us to augment the browsing experience…well I just discovered that Todd over at Big IDEA has implemented automated tags in scuttledu…see the added browsing feature.

From the post:

“When you register for the service, you are asked to provide your grade level and subject area. When you add a bookmark, these two pieces of information become tags. You have the option of not using these tags as well.

…When you log in to the service you are in “teacher mode” by default. This means that when you add a bookmark it will automatically be tagged with your grade level and subject area. You can change the grade level and subject area if you teach more than one subject. You can also switch to “not-teacher mode” by clicking an icon in the upper-right corner. In teacher mode, the icon is a person wearing a graduation cap; in not-teacher mode, the icon is a person wearing a baseball cap. The link toggles between the two modes. In “not-teacher” mode, your bookmarks are not automatically tagged with your grade level and subject area. Use this, for example, if you are bookmarking sites not related to your teaching duties.”

More on this other post:

“Scuttledu does not try to impose a formal taxonomy on users; if users don’t want to tag their bookmarks with grade level and subject area tags, they don’t have to. It is interesting to note, however, that there have been some attempts by del.icio.us users to use community-defined tags. Emily writes about her experience in the nptech tagging experiment…”

Round up of different folksonomies that are a feature or two away from being a blog-based folksonomy.

To start with:

Furl
CiteULike

Both of these have permalinks, so that’s a start, but they lack comments, and trackbacks at the permalink level.
These are social bookmark managers, that’s what they are set up to do
…but if you were to have a similar system where you could just post text without needing to bookmark something, then you would have a blog (or note, or text) based folksonomy.

For a blog-based folksonomy each user space needs four essential functions:

1. Just able to post text (don’t have to be linking to something)
2. Permalinks
3. Comments for permalinks
4. Trackback for permalinks

Here are some close candidates:

Tagifieds (more of a bulletin board than a note folksonomy)
- post just text
- permalinks (or permatag)
- comments for permalinks
- no trackback
- public

NumSum (focus is in sharing spreadsheets)
- post text as a description of your spreadsheet
- permalinks
- comments for permalinks
- no trackback
- public

Simpy Notes (bookmark folksonomy with a notes feature)
- post just text
- permalinks
- no comments
- no trackback
- private only

TagFacts (dedicated notes folksonomy)
- post just text
- no permalinks
- comments
- no trackbacks
- public

Here is the closest so far:

…although this goes beyond a blog-based folksonomy and integrates the space into a forum.

Tagsurf (more of a forum than a note folksonomy)
- post just text
- permalinks
- comments for permalinks (and each comment has a permalink of its own, and can also be tagged)
- trackbacks
- public

[ADDED 18/10/05: TextSnippets (note folksonomy for sharing “codes”, displayed in boxes)]

- post just text
- permalinks
- comments for permalinks
- no trackbacks
- public

[ADDED 20/10/05: NoteTagger (dedicated note folksonomy at last!)]

- post just text
- permalinks
- comments for permalinks
- no trackbacks
- public
- categories as well as tags
…lacks RSS feeds, lacks viewing a category or a tag at the user level.

[ADDED 21/11/05: Gather (dedicated blog folksonomy at last!)]

- post just text
- permalinks
- comments for permalinks (hopefully)
- no trackbacks
- public

How does del.icio.us fair if someone were to clone it into a blog-based folksonomy (why not, at least someone could clone del.icio.us another way without having to be a focused social bookmark manager for a change)…it would need all four of the essential features as mentioned above (although you can do text based posts using a 3rd party such as pasta or wetaste.

Multi-user blogs

Ideally your blog is in a multi-user blog system that is a folksonomy…two web 2.0 applications merged into one environment, you’ve got to love that!

At moment there are heaps of multi-user blog systems on the market…they come together on a front page displaying entries from all blogs, and list links to the source blogs on the sidebar, and all your subscription information as well…this type of blog aggregation can also be done within a folksonomy.

Only difference is that the blogs will look a bit more generic, unless the software lets you customise your user space…eg. Raw Sugar (social bookmark folksonomy), promoted as a multi-user link blog folksonomy allows you to personalise your user space with banner images and text.

The search feature could be your own community version of Technorati Tags…as well as being able to search full-text.

KM

I really think there is a market for this; an application that you can download and customise, where every one has a blog, but they all come together (aggregation) in a folksonomy.

This could be good for enterprise blogging, as you are not only blogging, but you’re really taking advantage of knowledge sharing the blog content via the sharing and discovery qualities of a folksonomy system…a great knowledge management initiative in teasing out tacit knowledge and sharing it at the same time within the same system.

In a days work you will be sharing your knowledge as information in a blog post, where others are doing the same, and you will be discovering new information from the folksonomy (aggregated blogs) and process it into your personal knowledge base, as others are doing at the same time, and then impart that new knowledge into a new post as information, as others are doing, and so on….very synergistic.

So here is a days work for tacit knowledge where you are creating, sharing, discovering, and codifying in the same portal…a social setting which enables the circular motion of turning knowledge into information, and information into knowledge, all with a bottom-up approach…this is empowerment!

By having the creating (blogging), sharing, and discovery function (folksonomy or blog aggreagtion) in the same system you are sharing and discovering by default, as you create and share your blog posts…learning is best when it is effortless or you don’t even realise it’s happening.

More

You could also incorporate this into a bigger system, where you can tab at the top of the homepage of the blog-based folksonomy, to a social bookmark (or linkblog) folksonomy, and then tab again to an aggregation of both, and tab again to a wiki/s (which could incorporate the cream of the content from both folksonomies into topic portals).

You could also make search feeds from both folksonomies, and take tag feeds (user or home level) and make Public RSS Topic Aggregators or display them in a virtual desktop.
…once you have both folksonomies in place you can re-publish content in any way you like via RSS.

To recap there are four ways of blog aggregation:

1. Multi-user blog system
2. Blog-based folksonomy (maybe someone will release one soon..)
3. Newsmastering (Public RSS Aggregators)
4. Virtual desktop

Maybe this could be achieved by customising some of the open source folksonomies, such as Connotea, rubric (eg. del.irio.us), or Scuttle (eg. scuttledu…here is the announcement)

…also see Infoview.

Related posts:
Tag based blog
Folksonomies: Unique features

Thought I’d have a another go at TagSurf…gee this is hard to understand, hardly any documentation, but I managed to work out the main features…this is really an innnovative system, it should really be talked up a great deal more.

Tagsurf could easily be a tag-based blog (note/text) folksonomy, but it actually goes beyond this, as the users personal space is part of a forum environment…if this was stripped back a little you could have a multi-blog folksonomy system.

How it works

This is a forum based folksonomy where every user has a personal space where they can make posts (which have permalinks), and they can also reply to other users posts (these also have permalinks).

The reason each comment is a permalink and can also be tagged is that a comment is considered the same thing as a post, they are both seen as published contributions.

So when you look at your user page there is a reverse date chronological order of a mix of posts, and comments (you have made on other user posts or even replying to your own posts), and each entry (post or comment) is organised with the tag/s you applied.
NOTE: if you don’t enter your own tags when replying to someone’s post, it will default to the tags that person used for their post, so when you go back to your account you will maybe have some new tags added to your tag list.

Now if someone else comments on one of your posts, this should show up in the thread of the post, and not on your front page…with some of my comments I have actually commented on my own posts, so that’s why they are showing up on the front page.

So if you click on the Title or the Thread link in one of your posts you will see the thread (comments) to your post
…the post also has its own permalink, and so does every reply/comment on that post…here is the permalink of the 3rd comment I made on my own post.

If you click on the Title or Thread link of a comment you made (re:) on someone’s post or on your own post, you will see the thread (comments) to that persons post…this reply you made on someone elses post has it’s own permalink

Other features

In your user account each item has a link called My Tags, when you save a new tag for that post, it is wrapped in brackets next to the other tags within that post…why the brackets, and also why isn’t listed in your tag list?
To edit tags in each post you need to use the edit link, so what is this My Tags link?

In your user account each post has a (+ -) link, meaning trust up, or trust down…not sure what this means as the server started to fault (My Trust List)…must be a rating system.

If someone leaves a comment/reply on your post it goes in your Message Queue, as well as appearing in the thread of that post.

Each public tag has an RSS feed

Each user account has an RSS feed

Each users tag has an RSS feed

Each Thread has an RSS feed

…all these can be managed in the My Watches section.

Also has trackbacks for every post, and for every comment.

If you tag an entry (a post or a comment/reply) with an email or a usersID it will be sent to that person’s email queue, or if they are not a member of TagSurf it will act as an invite
…I wonder if this is where the del.icio.us:for idea was discovered.

You can also tag entries with a URL as the tag, but they don’t appear in the tag list, they appear at the bottom of the post as a reference…this is an alternative to embedding the link(s) in the post
…this is a good idea because in Tagsurf clicking on a Title of an item goes to the permalink within Tagsurf and does not launch to the native site as in del.icio.us…see this entry.

My Custom Views???

My Notifiers???

2 bookmarklets are available, one to bookmark a page, the other to check if the page has been marked already by someone in Tagsurf.

Robin Good has the low down on a new intelligent site search tool called LookAhead.

Basically it is a search box for your site, that auto-suggests search terms as you type…these suggested search terms are actually subject terms based on a thesaurus or lexicon that you have programmed into your LookAhead site search tool.
If you don’t have a controlled vocabulary to import into the tool, they also have a service called Lex-It which will generate a lexicon for you (obviously not as effective as human indexing or thesaurus construction).

So basically it it subject searching with auto-complete, but the beauty of it is that it has a pre-browsing window, you don’t have to commit to viewing a page until you are done navigating the vocabulary (which seems to be listed alphabetically).

Next to each suggested term is a number denoting the number of terms under that, and so on…if the number is one, this will be a direct link to the webpage.

If you type in the term “RSS”, the backend thesaurus says if someone types in “RSS” also show hits from the terms “Atom”, “Feed”, “Syndication”…very much an enterprise search mechanism. Sometimes when this happens you wonder why you are getting these type of hits, it is good when the search engine tells you that it also has included hits from these other terms.

Not sure if it does this, but it would be good if it would say “see also Atom”, “broader term Feed”, “narrower term RSS metrics”…that way you could look at only articles within the term “RSS”, or only articles within the term “Atom”, or articles from both by choosing to click on the broader subject term “feed”, or articles from the narrower subject term “RSS Metrics”
…I guess this is an alternate view to an alphabetical view.

More from the interview on Robin’s post:

“…On the Google search box that allows my readers to find content on my site, the moment that they would start typing, whatever key word or sentence on some topic or issue or tool, they would get immediately a popup box next to that search box that would reveal all of the articles that I have on that topic.”

…We also provide the webmaster or the site owner with the ability to create their own unique vocabulary.
So, for example, if you type in the term, you start typing in the term “mountain lion,” perhaps the term mountain lion is no where to be found on the site, but in fact the webmaster through our technology has said panther and mountain lion are the same, they are equivalent, so you could type in mountain lion and in fact find the pages with panther on it.

…So, for example, if you typed in mountain, and you selected mountain lion from the drop down, it could take you directly to a mountain lion page, or it could just populate the search box with “mountain lion,” and then you could further modify that.”

Refining the results

A related function to this service is experienced when searching on Scirus, although this lacks the auto-suggest, and pre-browsing window…but the similar thing is the term suggestions…really it’s only refining what you got (your results), in contrast with the focus of this post which is about the initial discovery.

If you search a subject term on Scirus like “kuroko mines”, the sidebar will list keyword suggestions…although I don’t think this is based on a thesaurus, I think it is based on these keywords appearing in your results, so it’s a refined search. Actually Engineering Village2 also does this but you can refine your results not only by keyword, but by subject term, publisher, author, document type, year, etc…
I guess Teoma, and Clusty also do this with their subject/topic/group clustering.

I suppose these are more mining techniques to drill down into the opaque web (they make up for lousy search terms)
ie. a lay person might be looking for “bottle wholesalers in Australia”, and their search term may be: bottle wholesaler Australia, they may be lucky, they may be not…the cluster might suggest the term “manufacturers”, offering a worm hole into what would be the 200th page in the results (as it turns the successful website may have called themselves a manufacturer even though they are also a wholesaler…so the refined suggestion was fortunate, and made up for the intelligence of the user not thinking to use that term as an alternative search attempt)

…boolean searching also fits into this scenario as another web-mining tool.