Library clips

I’ve been waiting a long while for a social bookmarking experiment within the enterprise, and IBM are away with dogear…see more…also here.

A few of my previous posts touch on this topic.

Whether a tagging system is a prelude into setting up a taxonomy, or social bookmarking is celebrated for it’s uniqueness I think it is a great KM tool nonetheless.

At the moment there seems to be a few services that you can customise to make your own folksonomy (I’m not talking Ning), they are:
- Scuttle (eg. ScuttlEDU)
- rubric (eg. del.irio.us)
- Connotea (eg. Connotea)
- bookmark4U
- Freetag (integrate tagging to your portal)

See a post by URLgreyhot on the enterprise folksonomy called infoview (based on a request or need for a place to save articles, and a way to re-publish articles on corporate portlets)…what better way than a bookmarking system, but hang on these things are also for discovery and sharing, this social aspect makes them a news outlet of their own.

A great idea from the IBM article was linking user information from dogear with other corporate portals (such as profiles, directories, blogs, groups, etc…)…imagine del.icio.us had a profile page that also had your tagged contacts, like Tagalag.
Anyway the great thing about this is that someone searching the staff directory can really get an insight into your interests and your social circle, way more than a one liner describing your interests in a profile or from your resume.

Using a subset of dogear for project groups, dogear can be used as a place to store all relevant articles on a project which can be shared amongst the group, with RSS notification…also the personal context of tags seem to be work better or cross over in a confined group, as it will be a common context if the bookmarks from all accounts are related to the same subject matter and the users work in the same cultural space, ie. the emerging vocabulary will be more succinct, and due to a smaller scale it is easier to review the aggregated tag set.

Also since everyone in the organisation can use dogear, maybe there can be various home pages, one for each business unit, one for each COP, one for each locality, reason being that the sales team probably won’t be interested in bookmarks from the finance team, or the IT team, etc…this wouldn’t be creating silo’s as you are made aware of all the instances of dogear, which everyone can access, and you can be a member of multiple instances as long as your bookmarks won’t pollute the subject matter of another instance.
Maybe at the time of bookmarking you can choose which instance/s a particular bookmark will be posted to.

The other great simple thing is that any instance, user account, tag, any page from dogear can be re-syndicated as it has an RSS feed, so this is great to highlight the latest stuff on business unit, project page, etc.. on the Intranet.

The article also offer some statistics, and a sociogram (connections of people via their interests, and to distinguish between the information seekers and providers)…I’d like to see more statistics in the future, so far 17,000 bookmarks in 3 months, I wonder what the tag variation is, and how cleaning tag sets will work, or if it is needed.

What about filing/tagging PDF’s, and office documents?

Tagalag is a tagging system for contacts or profiles, not a bad idea at all.

In brief this is a place to store and share all your contacts by tag.

Each account is made up of 5 sections: my feeds, incoming tags, and outgoing tags, photo, map

- My Feeds is a place to display feeds that represent you such as your blog feed, social bookmarks feed, there is also an OPML file for all your feeds (reading list)

- Incoming tags is a list of people who have entered your email address in their account and described you or your association with them by a descriptive tag label.

- Outgoing tags is when you enter someone’s email address into your account, organised by tag

- Photo (this is what I look like or how I choose to describe myself)

- Map (this is my location)

It’s really simple an effective, the great thing about it, is that aggregated emails and tags are the perfect data to host in a folksonomy environment.
You can share and discover people by tag (each tag hopefully describes the person within the greater context of the folksonomy, a tag like “friend” won’t really have any context in the greater folksonomy)…not only does the tag describe the person, but if you go to that persons account, you will see their contacts, which tells you more about them (who they are associated), and also you can see a little bit of their profile or interests in the My feeds section.

It would also be good if there was a My OPML section, this tells people even more about your interests, and attention data.

You don’t even have to be at the Tagalag website to tag people, you can even tag people from within an email…see here.

Start discovering on the home page…recently tagged people are discovered on a map (note: this is recently tagged, these aren’t neccessarily new people added to the Tagalag service…I guess this is popularity).
Also see Active Taggers, Popular Users (not sure how this differs), and Popular Tags.

Actually a tag cloud is in order, and maybe some feeds to keep track of new people who have been tagged with your favourite tag.

What about groups?…a view of Tagalag within a group (keep a clean tag set, and only invite people)

This service could do something similar to the Blogging Librarians group in Frappr.
You could use the tag “Blogging Librarians” and when you view all people within this tag you can click to their user accounts, or use the map to discover people…at the moment Tagalag doesn’t have a map view for each tag.

Promote Tagalag with an icon for your blog, so you can say “Tag Me!”..see the tools page.

CrunchNotes points us to a post by J Wynia which describes how to extract the most popular posts from an OPML. Here is a sample from the Web 2.0 Workgroup’s OPML.

As you can see the sample has the most popular posts within the OPML file sorted by feed, it would also be good to see a river of news version of this (not sorted by feed).

You have to be technically minded to make your own, way over my head, but I’d like to see a service like this take off.
It really is a great idea, as an OPML file can be a topic blogosphere of it’s own, being able to organise the posts from an OPML file by popularity, is like making your own Technorati…what’s hot within an OPML file…good stuff!

Well, it’s not really as fast as Technorati as it’s based on the Yahoo! API, but if it was based on some type of real live web, it could be your own version of Technorati on your favourite part of the blogosphere or better put, view the most linked to posts from a selection of your favourite blogs.

[ADDED: of course I forgot to add that an RSS feed for an OPML Sampler page would not show you the latest posts from each feed, but the most popular posts…see more from Alex]

ScoopGO! is a watered down version of Rollyo, or Swiki.

Basically you can create a search tool to search selected feeds of your choice (30 max), you can also pick/add from suggested feeds.

Every search box has a title and is categorised from a selection of system categories (no use of tags…hmm!)

The front page has a selection of user accounts where you can access the scoops they have created…there is also a showcase of some popular scoops.

The Manage section allows you to manage your scoops (edit, delete, copy a scoop, etc…)

Every feed added to a scoop is kept in a list, you can view summaries of this feed within scoopGO or go to the native site.

Every scoop has a dashboard, check out the scoop dashboard for technews.

This shows the Title and description of the scoop, and a link to the user.
You can search in the scoop search box, and also view the latest titles or summaries from each feed in the scoop.

more…

Plugin for firefox
Create a search box for your website
Create a pre-defined search term within a scoop

[via RSS compendium blog]

Urlgrey has a post with some realistic insight into the use of a tag cloud for an OPAC.

What sort of tag clouds could be generated:

- number of items with a given subject term (tag)

This just tells us how many books, etc.. on a particular subject term (tag) are in the library, this is based on how the librarians index
…We can get an idea of what subjects a library specialises in.

I suppose a tag cloud could be done for books, journals, videos, etc…or combine them all.

Davey P has gone ahead and created a sample for his OPAC.

Notice when you mouse over a tag it shows all the list of subject headings within a subject, taking this experiment further, this could also be a tag cloud within a tag cloud.

- Urlgreyhot suggests you could make another tag cloud that represents borrowing frequency (usage)

A tag cloud based on popularity, showing what are the popular subjects.

This way you could compare the first tag cloud, to see how many books are on a subject, with the second tag cloud, to see how often people are borrowing books from this subject.
In turn you can make use of this knowledge with respect to collection development, marketing, etc…This is nothing new, you can do this with statistics anyway, it’s just a visual view of the same figures.

- What about user tag clouds (free tagging)

These are the ones we are familiar with, although tag clouds don’t have to represent user choices, they are just a representation of data
…if users tagged items in an OPAC it could just be a complementary way to search for something, although, every item has to be tagged at least once to be represented in the tag cloud.

To help search for known items the subject term tag cloud could be presented as a list in weighted order or in alphabetical order.

Here are Davey P’s 2 posts:
Taggytastic!
Taggytastic! (part 2)

Related Posts:
Public RSS Aggregator Folksonomy: Visitor Tags and User Tags
Enterprise folksonomy

Microsoft have extended RSS with the release of SSE (Creative Commons license), the basic way to explain how SSE has extended RSS is by this example, from the SSE FAQ:

“…SSE could be used to share your work calendar with your spouse. If your calendar were published to an SSE feed, changes to your work calendar could be replicated to your spouse’s calendar, and vice versa.”
So it is different than the RSS notification, as it replicates content, that’s pretty powerful stuff.

So you no longer have to share the same calendar, or subscribe to an RSS feed to get the latest updates from someone else’s calendar entries…you can both have your own calendar, and when you make an edit to your’s it will reflect in someone’s else’s calendar (provided they subscribe to your SSE feed)…so in essence it is decentralised collaboration, and it doesn’t matter what application you use, as long as it accepts SSE feeds.

What if you don’t want a particular entry to appear on someone else’s calendar who subscribes to the SSE feed of your calendar, can you disable it for the moment…or can the recipient chooses to accept the entry or not?

Besides calendars, SSE can be used for anything such as blogrolls, contacts, lists, etc…SSE can also extend OPML, so this may be a way of making OPML reading lists dynamic.

SSE blogs?

We all know a blog can offer an RSS feed, but can your blog subscribe to an extended RSS feed (SSE feed) of another blog?

If you have two blogs can a post you make in one blog, replicate in the other blog (provided it subscribes to the SSE feed)…as mentioned before what if you don’t want every post replicated, only posts of your choosing.

This is different than your blog subscribing to an RSS feed that displays content in the sidebar, this is allowing contents from another feed to be replicated or published in your main body along with your content
…what about categories, author stamp, archives, linking back to the original post.

I know you can publish to multiple blogs in one go when using offline blogging clients, but this is a bit different as the second blog may not be your blog.

If you have a collective of blogs you can splice all their feeds and place it in a master blog with content from all their feeds appearing in the one blog.

What if this master blog doesn’t want to include every post from all these blogs, it may only want posts about a certain topic, or it may just not want personal posts.
In this case every blog in the collective could make a category in their blog called eg. “master blog” (hopefully their blog allows to file posts in multiple categories, as I’m sure they’d like to apply other categories as well to the same post), and you could splice one category feed from each blog instead of the main feeds, this way the master blogs will only have the selected content from all these blogs.

Can SSE add any new value to this scenario?

The key word with SSE is replicate, I guess this is different to re-syndicate, as the recipient can send stuff back down the same channel, so the other keyword is bi-directional.

I wonder what other things people can find to do with SSE, shouldn’t take long with some quick socialising in the blogosphere…imagine the blogosphere was heavily used for AIDS or CANCER research, rather than journals, I think a discovery would be round the corner in no time (all these great minds sharing their thoughts, with immediate feedback and discussion)…this is surely a way to advance science in a more quicker and collaborative way, especially in an inter-disciplinary way…bit off topic…although, there are no rules with blogging, nothing wrong with stream of consciousness.

Concise definition of SSE

Scotty’s take:

“1. to use RSS as the basis for item sharing – that is, the bi-directional, asynchronous replication of new and changed items amongst two or more cross-subscribed feeds.

2. to use OPML as the basis for outline sharing – that is, the bi-directional, asynchronous replication of outlines, such as RSS aggregators subscription lists - from Microsoft”

Related

RSS Extensions

Is Feedmail or the IM feature in Quikonnex bi-directional, but doesn’t replicate?

I think ICE is just a more business oriented version of RSS?

Back to reading lists.

Feedster has just released their new Top 500 blogs/feeds, and these are all grouped into tags, thankgod for that, as the list is too long to go through a page at a time, browsing by tag is more targeted to my needs…actually there is also a summary version…Feedster have applied the initial tags, but as you will see next to each entry there is a link for users to tag these blogs.

I’d also like to search by title field for quicker findability.

They also supply an OPML file for all 500 blogs, this would be a heavy load into your RSS Reader…maybe you can limit this by changing the value of the 500 in the URL.

Anyway why not offer an OPML file for each tag…imagine when reading lists (dynamic OPML) are the norm, you could subscibe to the URL of an OPML file of user defined topics of the most linked to (talked about) blogs.
Since Feedster Top500 is based on popularity, blogs would drop in and out of each tag each minute/hour, and you would always be subscribed to the hottest stuff from your favourite user topic as your OPML file is not static, it flows with the changes.

I imagined that Technorati could have OPML files for each Blog Finder topic, the difference is these topics are author-defined and the OPML file would be more stable as blogs wouldn’t be neccessarily deleted unless the author manually took their blog out of a topic, you would get blogs being added everyday, but this list wouldn’t be as volatile as a list decided on incoming links, which is constantly changing with every movement within the blogosphere.

Technorati Top 100 doesn’t have tags or an OPML file, but it would be a good idea, they could use the author-defined tags at least from their BlogFinder, I mean the information is sitting there anyway…then just add an OPML file to each tag.
Actually this would depend if every blog within the Top 100 was listed in Technorati Blog Finder, if it wasn’t then it wouldn’t have a topic/s.

PubSub has released house edited lists, instead of having a Top 100, they have collated some blogs into topics, and then these blogs compete for positioning based on their popularity (not sure if the list is a closed set of blogs or if they have categorised all the library related blogs in their database, if so you might see new blogs appear on the list)…also not sure how they went about categorising blogs.
The OPML file for this blog would be similar to a tag OPML file in the Feedster Top500.

Imagine if Bloglines had a robust search engine and had something like this, they could also offer popularity for each feed according to reading behaviour of users, so ranking would not only be based on incoming links, but also from density of readership, or offer 2 separate lists.

Rojo could offer an OPML file for feeds by user-defined tags ranked on user reading behaviour, as they already have tags for feeds.
Similar to the Technorati BlogFinder example above, these OPML lists won’t be as volatile as popularity OPML lists (based on incoming links) as once you have tagged a feed in your RSS reader you aren’t really going to move it to another tag, or apply a new tag to an existing feed that often…more often you will see new feeds in tags as people add them to their readers, or feeds dropped from tags as users drop them from their readers (in saying this if one person drops a tag from their reader, it doesn’t mean it will disappear from that tag as another user may have tagged the same feed with the same tag).

So even though you won’t see blogs coming and going from each tag OPML file as often as one based on incoming links, you will see them ranked higher in the list due to the aggregated reading behaviour of all Rojo users (visits, clicks, flagging, maybe even ratings).

We tag the blogs in the top100 lists
We tag the blogs in the RSS readers
Ranking is based on our reading behaviour
Ranking is based on our ratings
Ranking is based on us linking to people
We make the blog posts

Not long ago I was trying to understand how people make blog posts via an outlining tool.
Mike at Crunchnotes has informed us that soon enough this will be officially possible…although when you compare the screen shot of the outliner to the sample blog post , the blog post doesn’t seem to have collapsable nodes for each paragraph.

So if you constantly blog from an outliner, this will mean you have 2 lots of contents for your blog, one in the outliner, and one in the blog, so the outliner is a back up of your blog.
Not only will the outline have every post from your blog, but it will be organised in an outline format, kind of like a quick view index of your blog, but it also contains all the contents as well (if you expand the nodes).
1st level folder - blog title, followed by date, followed by post title, followed by the post contents, this is like a directory of your blog, that includes the contents if you wish to see it.
The best part about it is you can do what ever you want with it as it has an OPML file.

You could also create another OPML file of your blog with category folders, you’d just have to drag and drop the contents from the first outline into the second outline after each post (so you are not posting to your blog from this outline, you are just copying the content from the 1st OPML file in order to view the contents by category)

Then, somehow, you could place 2 outline boxes into the sidebar of your blog, one to view content by date, the other to view content by category.

So if you outline your blog posts in an outliner and then publish it to your blog, you will have an outline version of your blog packaged in a neat OPML file.
Then there would be two places to read your blog, at the outline URL, or the blog itself (with the outline embedded into the sidebar).

NOTE: This OPML file can’t be imported into an RSS reader, as the items or nodes are just links, and text, not RSS feeds

Your RSS reader OPML file can reveal a lot about you, just read Alex’s post (which also references Lisa’s post) on how you could in turn share this data to a service so they can recommend stuff, just like Ultragleeper can recommend feeds.

Your OPML file not only reveals your interests but your behaviour or degree of interest (attention data).
Some RSS readers can automatically delete stuff or run reports on feeds that haven’t had new posts, more interesting is that it can also tell your most visited and viewed, and least visited and viewed feeds.
But this type of information is kind of ambiguous at revealing your degree of interest as you may click and view stuff, to realise you don’t like it, so the RSS reader doesn’t know the consequences of reading an item, ie. whether you liked it or not, also sometimes you click through because of the difference between summary and full-text feeds
…flagging an item is more definite.

Along these lines I did a post agreeing that explicit voting or rating a post is more reflective of your real interest, this is also a better method in ranking your feeds that don’t post often.
Only drawback is what if I couldn’t be bothered voting for a post if I have already read a very similar post previously, the second feed wouldn’t seem as important to your RSS reader statistics, but you still like reading this feed…I think that’s why voting and visits/click will work hand in hand.
If we have already read a similar post we probably couldn’t be bothered voting for a current post, but I suppose you have already read a similar post because it is ranked higher in your RSS reader list.

More on your OPML at attention data at DLTQ:
“OPML has so much potential. If I spend time on my OPML file, I will eventually build a multi-layered outline of my entire public life as well as parts of my personal life. For Amazon, this file would have some value. It would also have value for potential customers, employers, or partners in projects. With the growth of OPML browsers, we will be able to surf such accounts of people’s lives.”

Here is almost a real life scenario of OPML attention data, the items in this sort of OPML file are just text, but the idea is that a service could absorb this OPML file and recommend stuff.

There are many tools that deliver RSS feed content in an email format, this is RSS to email.

What about the other way around, email to RSS.
You can subscribe to email alerts with a special email address (such as Bloglines offers) and read that email content in RSS format…others are dodgeit, email2rss, pop2rss, egorrss, FutureMail, mailbucket…and many more.

eg. Gmail has a feed for it’s inbox, so you can read new mail in your RSS reader.

What about this at the tag level, you could set a rule so certain emails bypass your inbox and receive into a tag, this way you can subscribe to new mail by tag and not your whole inbox, as you may be only interested in receiving only select email from your Gmail RSS feed…or even extend this to a search feed…RSSMail comes close to this…also see AfterMail.

Another scenario

What about a feed notification, not for your inbox (as you receive the email), but a feed for a tag (after you have read the email and then file your email), if you don’t tag it and just archive, this will mean you have decided to not share that email.
So each tag can have a feed, if you want to file something in a tag but not want it re-syndicated, then just turn off the feed, tag it, then turn on the feed again…is this possible?
Anyway, this is a way to automatically re-syndicate or publish emails that you are OK to share.

I have posted about RSS to IM, what about IM to RSS, you could file an IM conversation in a tag that has a feed, this again is re-syndicating or publishing IM conversations…an RSS feed for your whole IM account wouldn’t be effective as you are taking part in it (it’s synchronous, you don’t need notification, it’s happenining in real time), although others may be interested in subscribing to the feed of an IM conversation in real-time (well as close to real time RSS can get)

These are just some thoughts I didn’t want to slip away, I can’t really see a great use for them, but others might see the value, or they may trigger other ideas…that’s what blogging is all about!

[ADDED 25/01/06: Check out Sabifoo (IM to RSS)]