Library clips

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