What is tagging? As a science editor, why do I need to know about tagging?

Tagging is an important part of Web 2.0 because it allows readers of to classify your content using their own terminology. With scores of readers classifying content, a user-defined taxonomy emerges. Wikipedia refers to the outcome as a “folksonomy,” defining it as “a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content.”

Have you ever tried to find a product in the grocery store using the store’s signage? Have you ever searched and searched, only to find the product and think, “why did they put that there?” Now, what if grocery shoppers organized that same grocery store, categorizing products by where they make the most sense? Perhaps crackers would appear with cheese, or cookies would appear next to the milk. The grocery store could be transformed based on shoppers’ actions!

As a science editor, think about how users might be classifying your content. Add social bookmarking icons to your site, thereby making it easy for those users to share content with others. It’s all about getting people to talk about your content, to attach importance to it, and to share it with others.

Melvin Dewey introduced to the world, the Dewey Decimal System (1876) for categorising books into 10 broad subjects then sub-categorising those, so on and so forth.

Today, for the Internet, we use a method which was first dubbed by Thomas Vander Wal (an information architect and web developer) ‘folksonomy’. It begins with tagging, first widely used by people on the FlickR network where users could label pictures with short descriptive text.

Folksonomy is a bottom-up user generated categorisation system, a method where you’re not required to have a degree in library science to participate.

Yes it reduces an almost perfect mathematical system for categorisation to words, but it means searching for images or blogs or any information on the internet much more effective and simple for the average user. Better still, with so much information out there in cyberspace, some of it being crap (excuse my French) we are able to categorise the useful data as folksonomists.

Recommending good articles in your social network has become alot easier by the work of folksonomists, so please use this privilege wisely and remember to tag relevantly.

Amazon and other digital library catalogues have now established a folksonomic approach to categorising books, Melvin Dewey will not be amused! But I love it! Helps me find the information I need in the most effective way.

Jeg har været et smut forbi den såkaldt globale tag cloud for den danske udgave af WordPress.com – den bloggingplatform, som jeg selv udgiver denne blog via. Årsagen var ingen anden, end at jeg ville undersøge, hvilke tags (emneord), som var mest populære her på aftenen før kommunalvalget – og idéen er delvist afstedkommet af hashtag’et #kv09 fra Twitter.

Listen så således ud:

Islam Danmark Jihad Immigration Skoler Dhimmi Folkeskolen Free speech Culture Demographics European Integration Immigrants Dhimmitude Arabization Eurabia Euro-Arabic Axis Europa Europe Hovedret Justice Crimes Politik Inspiration Abu Bakr radi Allahu anhu History War Holland Blandet Mental Performance Coaching De retskafne kaliffer Politisk korrekte Kitty Musik Venstrefløjen And… Fjerkræ Shopping Statistics Sundhed Litteratur Fertility Billeder Koran Salat Nyheder Welfare Journalister Bryllupsfotograf Vores Store Dag Hverdag USA Demografi Medier DR m.fl. Velkommen Anders Fogh Rasmussen Hodja Naturalization Naturalisation Loonies Film Dagbog Dagens outfit Familien Diverse Debat Indvandring Sverige Nicholas Carl Bøger Science Ligestillingens temaer -mediernes dækning Privacy Hvalpe Hverdag / Everyday Databeskyttelse Kreativitet / Creativity Grøntsags-tilbehør Kriminalitet Okse/kalv Generelt Overvågning Kunstnere Imamer Job Samfund Sweden Ytringsfrihed KRIG - TERROR og FASCISME Mit liv Al-Imamah Butik m.m. Privat Tanker LEKSIKON for det TYVENDE ÅRHUNDREDE Jura Mediedækning Frankrig Inde i mit hovede Seneste køb Patchwork Limewoody Imam Ali (AS) Blogging UnfoldIt Det Radikale Venstre Astronomi Workshop Opgaver Vintage Skribent: Mikkel Moskeer i Danmark? Alt det andet der sker omkring mig Astrobiologi Marianne Jelved Jødedom,Islam,Kristendom og anden religion Nick Ferie Træning Tilbehør Livet på tredje Medier Forside Ahlul Bait i Koranen Filmanmeldelse Skribent: Michael Plapren Refleksion Klara Censur Shop AMOK! Drømme og tanker Me Koncertanmeldelse Religion Erhverv Alarm Ligaen I Euroasien ° Eurasia Oplysning om islamisme Klimaeksempler Everyday life Kærligheden Skaldyr DÆS Indie Arkitektur Ego ego ego Arkitektfaglighed Evidens Asyl Boghylden Rodekassen Forfatter

Jeg må faktisk sige, at jeg er lidt forundret; især over, at skaldyr og “ego ego ego” er med på listen, ligesom jeg undrer mig over, hvem Nicholas Carl er?!?

Med andre ord: Ikke ret meget om valget dér.

Last night I played a show at the Rockit Room in the Inner Richmond district of San Francisco. I don’t know that I have anything particularly profound to comment about it, other than that it was important to me, and that as a result I’m sleep-deprived and a little sick today, therefore not feeling particularly moved to do any other deep analysis or commentary.

I’d been excited about this show ever since I landed it a month and a half ago. Truth is, though I’ve considered myself a serious musician for over ten years, everything I’m doing now is pretty new territory for me. It’s the first time in my life I’ve devoted nearly every spare moment to music, and actively sought to create as many extra spare moments as possible. It’s the first time I’ve tried to actively and unabashedly self-promote, the first time I’ve really hustled for gigs. And this was the first paying show at a specifically-for-music (as opposed to food) venue that I’d landed without having any preexisting contact.

The night before my band had our first rehearsal with everyone present. Guy Brown on guitar. Erika Oba on keys. Sarah Thompson backing me up with the vocals. For sure I was nervous about it coming together on short notice, but they’re all superb musicians, very responsive and present with what’s going on in the moment. Just as important, they’re all totally serious about making good music and not dicking around. We got everything together with about three weeks of hastily scheduled rehearsals. We came up with our band name, or rather I suggested four or five I’d had floating around in my head and they ranked them. Right now we’re Shareef Ali and the Radical Folksonomy, which basically speaks to my own obsession with categorizing/relating all that I encounter (see “Wikipedia Brown” as an example) and my belief in the right of common folk to reframe the world in drastic departure from tradition. Anyway, I think we all like the name pretty well, and I hope that some version of it sticks. We agreed to all wear button-downs and jeans, and I brought a supply of bandannas the day of the show so that they might better relate to my own presentation.

I am a fan of all of the groups I asked to play, and none of them disappointed: many thanks to Scotch and Bones, S.A. Bach (and Jonathan and Allie) and the Tenderloins for joining me on the bill last night. For my set, I was joined by the band on four songs: “World’s Oldest Profession”, “The State Of The Garden”, “Red Balloon” and “Broken Record”. It felt amazing to have all these other subtle musical elements woven throughout my songs, adding color, nuance and touches of each of the other players’ personalities. Simply put, the songs are sounding more like they were meant to than they ever have before. I was perhaps even a little distracted during the solo portion of my set because I kept thinking about how great whatever song I was playing was going to sound with everyone else doing their thing on it. As we were playing last night, I was feeling thrilled that we had pulled it off, and even more thrilled by the knowledge that if we could sound that good after just three weeks, how much we had to look forward to as a band. After our set ended, we had a big group hug onstage. I meant it, guys.

Also making my night totally special were all my wonderful friends who came out, not least of all two people who drove up from L.A. (not counting Sebastian and Co.); a buddy from middle school whom I still owe a drink; another friend who lives in SF but I stink at getting back to; and Cortnee Rose from the Starry Plough.

I had sensed earlier in the day that my throat had been feeling a little ticklish, and mid-set I knew that it was getting thin. But I powered through, and promptly afterwards I lost my voice. Today I’m alternating between honking and whispering. I should go to bed and really get serious about recovering, because we’re maybe going to have band practice on Saturday. But I’ve just given myself license to quote Conor Oberst:

You should never be embarrassed by your trouble with livin’; because it’s the ones with the sorest throats, Laura, who’ve done the most singing.

This week Cathy emphasised the importance of Labelling, Navigation, Wireframes and Prototyping. I have been reading Chapters 6 & 7 of `Information Architecture:Blueprints for the web` by Christina Wodtke and Austin Govella, in conjunction with `Don’t make me think` by Steve Krug which are helping to put what Cathy is trying to explain to the group in context. The importance of the research at this stage is taking prominence and it is now easier to see why it is so important, as Wodtke and Govella point out ` Like your scenarios, the sitepath diagram will reveal features and interactions you might not have thought of. Not only that, but when you’re done, you’ll have a nice picture of how the system should work`.

Cathy highlighted the differences between two sites, clearly showing how to avoid making a homepage too difficult to navigate. She also stressed how labelling (or plain signage) should be as clear and uncluttered as possible to avoid the user deciding to give up and look for their goods/information elsewhere. A positive example of clear signage was `Moo.com` and in fact, the most prominent fact which we spotted as part of our group’s competitor reviews was how simple most of the sites we evaluated were.

Cathy emphasised that most users visit the web for 3 reasons only: looking for something, accomplishing a task, wasting 5 minutes before the next meeting. These are all important factors to remember when designing the site, although it is very easy to become so immersed in the site that it is equally as easy to forget what our user is actually trying to do, thereby over complicating the matter.

We touched on `taxonomy` and `folksonomy` as terms which are widely used when considering labels and how facilitate our user’s journey as smoothly as possible. We also considered how to make labelling as effective as possible i.e if a button can be termed `search`, make sure that it is labelled as such and not something more ambiguous. We then looked at the Jared Spool site which considers his theory on the `$300 million dollar button` and how succint labelling generated a company just such a sum by simply removing redundant buttons and labelling correctly. It is a simple idea but perhaps easier to describe rather than put into practice. Again, as a group, I hope that we will be able to put these theories into practice. It was interesting to compare the Amazon and Interflora sites and how they directed their customers to pay – with Interflora causing great difficulty and delay by circuitous signing and unnecessarily complicated form filling. This has given us much food for thought when considering our site, although, thankfully we will not be involved with a site which sells products so will not have to set up a payment Wizard.

During the afternoon the practical exercise in Dreamweaver was challenging because it was new and the HTML language was not something I am familiar with. Cathy has assured us that we will have a CMS (Content Management System) in place when we actually build our site but it remains a daunting prospect, certainly for me. We then concentrated on our group work.

The group has collated all user research and we are now drawing up our personas, scenarios and user journeys ready to complete the site mapping necessary for next Friday. I have now been able to borrow a laptop from my daughters’ school which has made my working arrangements easier than last week when I kept having to borrow various laptops from friends. I hope that our home computer will be fixed shortly with all data retrieved so that I can continue more effectively.

A folksonomy é a maneira mais popular de organizar informação na internet. Esta expressão inventada por Thomas Vander Wal (information Architect) baseia-se no termo taxonomia (ciência de classificar) mas substitui o prefixo “tax” por “folks” que significa pessoas, amigos.

A organização segundo este princípio é feita pelas pessoas que utilizam o sistema. O modo mais comum é a partir de “tags” permitindo ao utilizador classificar o conteúdo com uma ou mais palavras passe. Nos sites de grande afluência em que o utilizador pode acrescentar informação, (youtube, blogpost, myspace) não seria possível uma organização por parte da administração. Quem adiciona a informação classifica-a com palavras passe e esta fica imediatamente organizada.

Outra possibilidade deste sistema é a conhecida “nuvem de temas” na qual podemos visualmente percepcionar qual o tema com mais entradas, e nalgumas o número exacto de tags relacionadas.

Author: Gwyneth Peaty
Date: Saturday, October 17, 2009 7:09:34 PM WST
Subject: Official Thread: Readings, Tagging and Folksonomies

Welcome to Topic 2.4: Content Sharing. Here are a few questions to start us off:After reading the articles, what do you understand to be the characteristics of a folksonomy?

 

What do you consider to be the benefits and limitations of using tags to organise information?

Weinberger states that traditional taxonomies put together by experts are “necessarily infested with personal, class, and cultural biases.” Do you believe folksonomies offer a way of organising information that is free of these biases?

In his discussion of ‘desire lines,’ Mathes argues that “the most important strength of a folksonomy is that it directly reflects the vocabulary of users.” Do you think the tagging system is most useful to those users who share similar ways of understanding and classifying information?

As always, please feel free to discuss and/or critique anything that catches your interest in the articles, lecture and course materials.

 

I found to begin with this subject confusing, not being 100% sure about the meaning of the words taxonomy and folksonomy. However, the Mathes reading was very helpful in clarifying the terms for me. Having the words related to real life examples that I have used such as Delicious and Flickr made it a lot easy to come to my own conclusions.

Previously I had heard of taxonomy with relation to Bloom’s Taxonomy, which is heavily used in education, a hierarchy of questions asked to students when beginning to learn something new.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_Taxonomy

With my limited knowledge currently, a folksonomy to me is basically where users add keywords to images, movies, links etc. These keywords or tags are searchable and offer a more diverse categorisation system. One benefit to this style of organising information with tags is that you may be able to find keywords that you never knew about for that search. Related keywords can be very handy in finding alternate information. On the other handy a problem can arise with anyone adding irrelevant tags, polluting the results.

I think that one of the great concepts of a folksonomy is that it can be used to educate. For example, say  I was to go to Delicious and do a search for tags, not really knowing what they are. The third link I get when I search is a Clay Shirky article. Looking at the other tags I would soon realise that other related words include folksonomy, metadata and others. Therefore, using a folksonomy is a good way to educate yourself on differing keywords.

Author: Gwyneth Peaty
Date: Saturday, October 17, 2009 7:05:54 PM WST
Subject: Official Thread: Copyright, Mashups and Memes

 

Having a good understanding of copyright laws and the Creative Commons will be very important as you put together your Web Presence. This work is not only an assignment, but an online creation visible to everyone and therefore subject to copyright laws. Make sure you pay close attention to the course material on this topic!

A few questions:

After reading the material and watching the videos this week, what is your opinion of copyright as it is used in relation to creative works? Is it reasonable to control access to this material? Who seeks this kind of control and for what reason?

How do you view the mashup genre in relation to copyright?

(There are many examples of non-digital ‘mashups’ that you can find. A contemporary example is Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), which you may have seen in shops recently.)

Did you recognize any of the internet memes listed? What might the spread and mutation of these memes suggest about online communities?

Beard’s text (1972) described European travelers’ writings about the Transcaspian region. His work predates the intensive revisiting of seemingly objective narratives through a more critical lens that occurred in cultural studies.

“Traditionally the distinctive feature of the Transcaspian area is its isolation. Three of its boundaries are geographical barriers (the Caspian Sea, the Khirghiz Steppes, the Ferghana and Pamir mountain ranges) and the southern limits blocked from the sixteenth century until the last Russian annexations by the existence of Turkoman slave traders along the Atrak River and beyond. [...] None of the most famous British travelers- neither E. G. Browne, the Sherley Brothers, Richard Burton, nor even Thomas Coryate- went there at all. The accounts of those who did go into the Transcaspian are extremely useful for the study of Central Asian history. We often find them present at the battles and political discussions of the region (MacGahan at the fall of Khiva, O’Donavan at Geok Tepe), and we find one of them (Conolly) as involved in the political intrigue as it is possible to be. Central Asia seems in the long run to have been richer in travelers than in indigenous historians. There is much of course that we miss when reading an outsider’s view of local history [and] there is always a side to these books which shows the traveler’s own background and we can trace in them [...] the development of European attitudes towards the non-European world, from the merchants and the schemers of the seventeenth century to the missionaries and soldiers of the nineteenth (Beard 1972). “

View Reconfiguring Rivers: Amudarya-Oxus in a larger map

DRAFT!

Multi-Civilizational Timeline of Selected Events Related to Central Asia

(858 – 824 BC) “Ancient country of northwestern Iran generally corresponding to the modern regions of Azerbaijan, Kurdistan and parts of Kermanshah. Media first appears in the texts of the Assyrian King Shalmaneser III (858 – 824 BC) in which peoples of the land of Mada are recorded. The inhabitants came to be known as Medes … see also 2 Kings 17:6: In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria took Samaria, and carried Israel away into Assyria, and placed them in Halah and in Habor by the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes” http://ancientneareast.tripod.com/Media_Medes.html Media, Medes, Mada,

600 BC The ancient city of Afrasiab, Afrasyab, (later Samarkand) was founded in the 7th century B.C. “The historic town of Samarkand is a crossroad and melting pot of the world’s cultures. Founded in the 7th century B.C. as ancient Afrasiab, Samarkand had its most significant development in the Timurid period from the 14th to the 15th centuries. The major monuments include the Registan Mosque and madrasas, Bibi-Khanum Mosque, the Shakhi-Zinda compound and the Gur-Emir ensemble, as well as Ulugh-Beg’s Observatory (UNESCO-ICOMOS. 2009-09:221).” Afrasiab

c 500 BC. The earliest, Erk Kala, was founded c 500BC. Around 280 BC Erk Kala became the citadel for the much larger Hellenistic city of Antiochia Marginana (today known as Gyaur Kala) (Williams “dddd. ” Key words: The cities of Merv.

c. 280 BC Around 280 BC Erk Kala became the citadel for the much larger Hellenistic city of Antiochia Marginana (today known as Gyaur Kala). (Williams “dddd. ” Key words: The cities of Merv.

2nd Century BC “Present-day Yunnan is a province in Southwest China. Historically, Yunnan maintained close relationships with Southeast Asia, India, and Tibet, as archaeological findings and other studies have confirmed.1 As an interaction zone among several civilizations, Yunnan was influenced by and had an impact on other cultures. Scholars of China have named a trade route connecting the above regions the “Southwest Silk Road.”2 This international trade route geographically centered on Yunnan and Upper Burma. Yunnan’s importance, however, was based on far more than simply its location. Like Upper Burma, Yunnan is rich in precious metals such as gold and silver as well as other minerals such as tin, lead, and copper, and other local resources. In addition, Yunnan’s connections with the overland Silk Road and the maritime Silk Road greatly enhanced Yunnan’s role in transregional interactions. 1 This paper aims to demonstrate the global significance of Yunnan and to redraw the map of early Eurasian communication. While utilizing Chinese scholarship, I supplement Chinese scholars with non-Chinese sources to construct a more comprehensive picture of the Southwest Silk Road that in turn will add a new dimension to the Sino-foreign exchange and Eurasian communication. First, I will present a concise description of the road. Then, focusing on commercial items such as horses, silver, and cowries, I attempt to demonstrate the global importance of Yunnan by illustrating how Yunnan had shaped neighboring societies. Finally, the use of a world-system perspective will contribute to the ongoing world-system debates and add a new dimension to our understanding of Eurasian communications. Yunnan and Its Trans-Regional Trade: A Critique: Since the early twentieth century, scholarly investigations of the overland Silk Road and the maritime Silk Road have constructed a fundamental basis of the communication within the Eurasian supercontinent. While contributing a great deal to the understanding of ancient East-West exchange, studies of the above two silk routes have more or less overshadowed the third route, the so-called Southwest Silk Road from Southwest China via Burma to India.3 The earliest textual source of the Silk Road is Zhang Qian’s exploration in the Western Regions (xiyu) in the late second century BCE, recorded by Sima Qian in his Shi Ji. Nevertheless, Zhang Qian’s report indeed leads to another Silk Road: a road connecting Southwest China with India, where he found Sichuan cloth (Shubu) and bamboo cane (Qiongzhu) in Daxia (Bactria). Emperor Wu of Han (140–87 BCE) then dispatched his envoys and troops to pacify local polities around Yunnan, with the expectation that he could open this road for his sake. His efforts, unfortunately, failed. Because of Emperor Wu’s attempts, scholars in China for long time have paid a great deal of attention to this road. Many fragmentary and obscure records in Chinese historical writings prior to the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) referred to the exchange between China and India through jungles, forests, rivers, and mountains from Sichuan, Yunnan, Burma, and Assam to India. We have no firsthand accounts of anyone completing this journey from early periods. Chinese documents after the Tang have detailed records, but they could offer little help for purposes of drawing a map of regions far away from the Chinese empire (Yang 2004-09).”

1st century CE The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea was written by a Romanized Alexandrian in the 1st century CE. It gives the shoreline itinerary of the Red (Erythraean) Sea, starting each time at the port of Berenice. Beyond the Red Sea, the manuscript describes the coast of India as far as the Ganges River and the east coast of Africa (called Azania).

AD 77-79 Roman scholar Pliny the Elder published his encyclopedia of natural history Naturalis Historia which attempted to cover all of ancient knowledge available to Pliny at the time. He called Nature the universal mother. His method of referencing original authors, extensive indexing content and covering as much information on all ancient knowledge that was available to him at the time, has become the model for later encyclopedias. The encyclopedia— but not its author survived the AD 79 eruption of Vesuvius. It was first translated into English by Philemon Holland in 1601 and then in 1855 John Bostock and H. T. Riley provided a second English translation which included the index. Pliny the Elder (77-79)

“In the vicinity, too, of India, is Bactriana, in which region we find bdellium,[1] that is so highly esteemed. This tree is of a black colour, and about the size of the olive; it has leaves like those of the robur, and bears a fruit similar to that of the wild fig, and in nature resembling a kind of gum. This fruit is by some persons called brochon, by others malacha, and by others, again, maldacon. When of a black colour, and rolled up in cakes, it bears the name of hadrobolon. This substance ought to be transparent and the colour of wax, odoriferous, unctuous when subjected to friction, and bitter to the taste, though without the slightest acidity. When used for sacred purposes, it is steeped in wine, upon which it emits a still more powerful odour. The tree is a native of both India and Arabia, as well as Media and Babylon; some persons give to the bdellium that is imported by way of Media, the name of peraticum.[2] This last is remarkable for its brittleness, while, at the same time, it is harder and more bitter than the other kinds; that of India, on the other hand, is moister, and gummy. This last sort is adulterated by means of almonds, while the various other kinds are falsified with the bark of scordastum, that being the name of a tree[3] the gum of which strongly resembles bdellium. These aduiterations, however, are to be detected–and let it suffice to mention it here, in relation to all other perfumes as well–by the smell, the colour, the weight, the taste, and the action of fire. The bdellium of Bactriana is shining and dry, and covered with numerous white spots resembling the finger-nails; besides which, it should be of a certain weight, heavier or lighter than which it ought not to be. The price of bdellium, in its pure state, is three denarii per pound. [p. 3117]“
1. Fée remarks, that it is singular that a resinous gum, such as bdellium, should have been used in commerce for now two thousand years, and yet its origin remain unknown. Kæmpfer and Rumphus are of opinion, that the tree which produces it is the one known to naturalists as the Borassus flabelliformis of Linnæus, or the Lontarus of others [Genus: Lontarus Adans. Synonym of: Borassus L. Family: Arecaceae subfamily Coryphoideae tribe Borasseae subtribe Lataniinae Altfamily: Palmae Genus number: 20849 MFB]. It is imported into Europe from Arabia and India, and is often found mixed with gum Arabic.
2. peratikon; from periata gês “the remotest parts of the earth,” from which it was brought.
3. The modern name of this tree is unknown.
From CHAP. 19. (9.)–Trees of Bactriana, Bdellium or Brochon, otherwise Malacha or Maldacon, Scordastum. Adulterations used in all spices and aromatics. The various tests of them and their respective values.

570 AD Birth of Mohammed in the city of Mecca, on the caravan route between Yemen and Syria. Mecca is also known for the Kaaba, containing the sacred Black Stone

610 AD In Mecca Mohammed declared His Station as Prophet of God.

622 Year 1 of the Islamic calendar dating from the time Mohammed and His followers left Mecca.

632 Mohammed died. Islam spread throughout the Arabic world.

c. 632 – 700 AD a new Islamic city of Sultan Kala was built to the west, although Gyaur Kala continued in use alongside this, becoming an industrial suburb (Williams “dddd. ” Key words: The cities of Merv.

c. 1400s The Timurid city of Abdullah Khan Kala was constructed to the south, to which was added a suburb, Bairam Ali Khan Kala, around the eighteenth century (Williams “dddd. ” Key words: The cities of Merv.

c. 1700s The Timurid city of Abdullah Khan Kala was constructed to the south, to which was added a suburb, Bairam Ali Khan Kala, around the eighteenth century. (Williams “dddd. ” Key words: The cities of Merv.

1789 Antoine Laurent de Jussieu published Genera Plantarum, secundum ordines naturales disposita juxta methodum in Horto Regio Parisiensi exaratam. Gallica taxonomy,

1879 Russian campaign of 1879 against the Turkmen tribes, later avenged at Geok Deppe. See Marvin, C. 1880. The Russian Campaign against the Turkomans. London: W.H. Allen and Co.

Eye-witness account of General Ivan Lazarov’s disastrous Russian campaign of 1879 against the Turkmen tribes, later avenged at Geok Deppe.

1999 State Historical and Cultural Park Ancient Merv, Turkmenistan. Merv “is the oldest and best-preserved of the oasis-cities along the Silk Route in Central Asia. The remains in this vast oasis span 4,000 years of human history. A number of monuments are still visible, particularly from the last two millennia (UNESCO-ICOMOS. 2009-09:215).” Keywords: Murghab Delta

Politics of Naming

Bactria, Daxia, Balkh (Persian: بلخ – Balḫ, Old Persian; Ancient Greek: Bactra), was an ancient city and centre of Zoroastrianism in what is now northern Afghanistan. Bactria (Bactriana), the ancient name of the country between the range of the Hindu Kush (Paropamisus) and the Oxus (Amu Darya), with the capital Bactra (now Balkh); in the Persian inscriptions Bākhtri. It is a mountainous country with a moderate climate. Today it is a small town in the Afghani province of Balkh, about 20 kilometers northwest of the provincial capital, Mazar-e Sharif, and some 74 km (46 miles) south of the Amu Darya River. It was one of the major cities of Khorasan. The ancient city of Balkh, in today’s Afghanistan was under the Greeks renamed Bactra, giving its name to Bactria.[citation needed] It was mostly known as the centre and capital of Bactria or Takharistan. Balkh is now for the most part a mass of ruins, situated some 12 km from the right bank of the seasonally-flowing Balkh River, at an elevation of about 365 m (1,200 ft). wiki

bdellium (pĕrātĭcum, i, n., = περατικόν, a species of the bdellium-tree, Plin. 12, 9, 19, 35.)

Bukhara, “which is situated on the Silk Route, is more than 2,000 years old. It is the most complete
example of a medieval city in Central Asia, with an urban fabric that has remained largely intact. Monuments of particular interest include the famous tomb of Ismail Samani, a masterpiece of 10th century Muslim architecture, and a large number of 17th-century madrasas (UNESCO-ICOMOS. 2009-09:219).” It was named as a protected site in 1993. Buchara, Bukhara, Uzbekistan,

Itchan Kala “is the inner town (protected by brick walls some 10 m high) of the old Khiva oasis, which was the last resting-place of caravans before crossing the desert to Iran. Although few very old monuments still remain, it is a coherent and well-preserved example of the Muslim architecture of Central Asia. There are several outstanding structures such as the Djuma Mosque, the mausoleums and the madrasas and the two magnificent palaces built at the beginning of the 19th century by Alla-Kulli-Khan (UNESCO-ICOMOS. 2009-09:218).” It was named as a protected site in 1990.

Kunya-Urgench “is situated in northwestern Turkmenistan, on the south side of the Amu Daria River.
Urgench was the capital of the Khorezm region, part of the Achaemenid Empire. The old town contains a series of monuments mainly from the 11th to 16th centuries, including a mosque, the gates of a caravanserai, fortresses, mausoleums and a minaret. The monuments testify to outstanding achievements in architecture and craftsmanship whose influence reached Iran and Afghanistan, and later the architecture of the Mogul Empire of 16th-century India (UNESCO-ICOMOS. 2009-09:216).” It was named as a protected World Heritage site in 2005.

Merv “is the oldest and best-preserved of the oasis-cities along the Silk Route in Central Asia. The remains in this vast oasis span 4,000 years of human history. A number of monuments are still visible, particularly from the last two millennia (UNESCO-ICOMOS. 2009-09.” Keywords: Murghab Delta

Samarkand “The historic town of Samarkand is a crossroad and melting pot of the world’s cultures. Founded in the 7th century B.C. as ancient Afrasiab, Samarkand had its most significant development in the Timurid period from the 14th to the 15th centuries. The major monuments include the Registan Mosque and madrasas, Bibi-Khanum Mosque, the Shakhi-Zinda compound and the Gur-Emir ensemble, as well as Ulugh-Beg’s Observatory (UNESCO-ICOMOS. 2009-09:221).” Afrasiab

Webliographies and Bibliographies

• Anderson, Benedict. 1991 [1983]. “Census, Map and Museum.” Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso.
• Beard, Michael. 1972. “European Travelers in the Trans-Caspian before 1917.” Persee. 13:4:1900.
• Dickens, Mark. 1995. “Major Events Relevant to Central Asian History.” http://www.oxuscom.com/CA_History_Timeline.pdf
• UNESCO-ICOMOS. 2009-09. “World Heritage in Asia and Pacific.” UNESCO-ICOMOS Documentation Centre. http://www.international.icomos.org/centre_documentation/bib/worldheritageinasia-pacific.pdf
• Marvin, Charles Thomas. 1880. The Russian Campaign against the Turkomans. London: W.H. Allen and Co. Also listed as “The Eye-Witnesses’ Account of the Disastrous Russian Campaign against the Akhal Tekke Turkomans:
  Describing the march across the burning dessert, the storming of Dengeel Tepe, and the disastrous retreat to the Caspian.”
• Marvin, Charles Thomas. 1881. Merv, the queen of the world. London: W. H. Allen. “And the scourage of the man-stealing Turkomans. White an exposition of the Khorassan question.”
• Musselman, L. J. 2003. “Trees in the Koran and the Bible.” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Unasylva. 54:213. ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/005/y9882e/y9882e00.pdf
• Nasr, S.H. 1996. Religion and the Order of Nature. New York, USA, Oxford University Press.
• Pliny the Elder. 1855. [AD 77-79]. The Natural History. Translated by John Bostock, M.D., F.R.S. H.T. Riley, Esq., B.A. London. Taylor and Francis, Red Lion Court, Fleet Street.
• Vincent, William. 1807. [1998] The Commerce and Navigation of the Ancients in the Indian Ocean in Two Volumes. Delhi: J. Jeffrey for Asian Educational Series.
  Google Books includes the maps produced c. 1800. Map 1a: Caspian Sea in top left, Most of Amudarya Rivershed???, Bactria to east of southern tip of Caspian Sea, Aria south west of Bactria, Great Desert spanning lower half of map,
  Oman bottom left of map; Map 1b: Caspian Sea in top right, Media in middle, Gulf of Persia in bottom right,

  Vincent, William. 1807. The Commerce and Navigation of the Ancients in the Indian Ocean in Two Volumes. Volume I. London. Vol. I: The Voyage Of Nearchus From The Indus To The Euphrates (Around The Year 325 B.C.) Collected From The Original Journal Preserved By Arrian, And Illustrated By Authorities Ancient And Modern. Containing An Account Of The First Navigation Attempted By Europeans In The Indian Ocean. Vol. Ii: The Periplus Of The Erythrean Sea. Containing An Account Of The Navigation Of The Ancients From The Sea Of Seuz To The Coast Of Zanguebar.

• Vincent, William. 1807. “The Periplus of the Erythrean Sea.” The Commerce and Navigation of the Ancients in the Indian Ocean in Two Volumes. Volume II. London.
• Williams, Tim. “dddd. The landscapes of Islamic Merv, Turkmenistan: Where to draw the line?” Internet Archaeology. 25:1.
  This article by Tim Williams of the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, “outlines approaches for interpreting the Islamic city of Sultan Kala (Merv), c. 8th-13th centuries AD, based upon aerial photographic and satellite imagery. Hierarchies of assumptions (identification of individual wall lines; which frame spaces, rooms and courtyards; which are grouped as parts of specific buildings; which are part of urban blocks) and ontologies (information about these assumptions and the variable confidence of interpretation, from the position of lines to spatial function) provide a dynamic structure for the presentation of data, interpretation and theory (Williams dddd).
• Yang, Bin. 2004-09. “Horses, Silver, and Cowries: Yunnan in Global Perspective.” History Cooperative. 15:3. Northeastern University. Key words: Deep Internet, Deep Web.
• Yoon, Carol Kaesuk. 2009. Naming Nature: the Clash between Instinct and Science. New York and London: W. W. Norton.

Outside links

Notes

Internet Archaeology is a journal whose contents are only available through registration and subscription. It is therefore part of the much less accessible Deep Web.

ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites)

Shortlink http://wp.me/pEVEP-C

Before we dig into the whole structure and the intricacies that are wrapped around the usage of folksonomies, let’s first define its meaning. A derivation from the term “taxonomy”, folksonomies are a system of classification for managing user content. Classical forms are social bookmarking and photo annotation tools with Del.icio.us and Flickr as respective examples. These applications are quite useful for sifting the searches into individual segments within the specific medium and content of the article (i.e. baseball or food), but they do have their fair share of limitations.
 
The structure of folksonomies are constructed on a bottom-up approach where the whole basis of categorizing content in a non-hierarchical form is related upon the notions of convergence and use. It is the users who control the publication and the exercise of tags and this service is open to anyone, regardless of one’s background and  viewpoint. Code, content and social process all play an important role in establishing tags/folksonomy. The code is what makes it happen (i.e. realization) and allows users to see the content in space. Content is what folksonomies are all about and essentially is the centre for all activity. Social process is what manufactures the content and is the starting point for creating folksonomies/tags. Therefore in essence, it is the social process that constitutes and drives the structure of a folksonomy.

Social process hinges from the fact due to the knowledge and ability for human thought process. Again as folksonomies are another tool for social networking and an example of web 2.0 communications, the social process allows for the input and creation of content that is appropriate (yet it is an open space for anything) that convenes similar individuals into a shared collaborative group. The social process associates with the content and then the code applies to formulate the tag. To put into perspective, we have a picture of a picnic. The social process that connects to the content of the picture are tags like: happy, fun, food, games, etc. The structure is based on the purpose of adding a specific article which is reflective of the social process and implications, and this further translates into issuing the specific and relevant content for the tag.      

With a social process in place, it allows for a simplicity in posting a tag, yet the flaws and downsides to that are the attributes of duplication, imprecision and inconsistency among the use, such as ambiguity and marginalization.

I haven’t really looked at flickr much in terms of the way it functions as a social network in itself. As far as sharing images goes, flickr seems like the place that more serious photographers and image makers go. This is probably due to issues of ownership that arise with sharing images on facebook. Although a few people I know share paintings, drawings and their own professional photography on facebook, most of the images I come across are more personal amateur pieces. Flickr provides a completely image based community, but further than that, it assures users that content will remain theirs after it is uploaded. Flickr has its own commons and supports creative commons by allowing searches of creative commons licensed content.

Flickr demonstrates complex layers of categorisation. Images can be tagged and can be added to groups, sets, galleries or favorites. You can add notes or comments. You can join groups and add contacts. Flickr offers a folksonomy which is even more subjective and variable, because it offers many way in which an image can be labeled. Not only do you make a subjective decision in deciding what tags to use, but you make subjective decisions in how images are grouped and so, in how they are seen. Many of the images on flickr are just as everyday or just as insignificant to traditional modes of history as those on facebook. However, flickr shows a different way of aggregating material, which focuses possibly even less on who, where, when and much more specifically on what. On flickr communities can document their activities, aggregating information, which may be valuable to future members of these communities. Although the personal histories of flickr users may not have value to greater society at present, there is no way of knowing what value they may have in future.

image from h.koppdelaney on flickr

What histories do we create when we build our profiles? Are these histories the result of maintaining relationships and reinforcing the social codes we follow with certain people? For example are you inhibited by what your boss would think? Why do you tag and untag images of yourself? What is your tagging policy? Are these decisions based on how others would perceive you? Thus, does the integrity of facebook itself rest on our relationships? Forming and maintaining – if nothing but our external selves for those around us to observe?

The following images are screen shots taken from profiles. What can we assume of these people, and what do we assume of other people in our friend list? Who are we concerned with or by, when we choose are own profile pics?

How do we judge?

What do we know?

what can we assume?

can we assume anything?

How many times have you been tagged in a photo that isn’t you? I was tagged in this picture a few weeks ago along with 49 other people. (Apparently 50 is the most people you can tag in one photo.) It’s a appropriation of the “Jesus: all about life” posters. A friened of mine made it (I think he was trying to start a meme). It’s an interesting aspect of how images are used on social networks, that they can actually link to references rather than just imply them. People can communicate with you through tagging. When someone wants to show you something on facebook, they don’t send it to you, they tag you. Maybe this is because tagging is so simple and effortless. But perhaps it is also to do with the public nature of tagging. With the above image, friends of mine can see that I have been tagged, meaning that the image reaches beyond the initial network of its creator. Although I can untag myself I can’t stop anyone form tagging me in the first place. This means that, although I ultimately control what remains in the archive of my social network, I can’t control how I will be represented at all times.  In a way this is not so different from how photography has always worked. You can’t always control who has your image or how they will use it. However, there are slight differences, given that the tagging function allows people to affiliate you with images that are not of you. In this and many other ways your friends play a large role in shaping your online identity.

This practice links in with the idea of folksonomy. It is a really interesting way of categorising images, which varies quite a lot from the way someone might arrange a physical photo album. Facebook photo tagging demonstrates the key features of a folksonomy as discussed in class. It is a more personal and subjective way of labeling the material. This tagging process differs greatly to how things are tagged on delicious or in blogs because it is slightly more consistent and at the same time, a little more interactive. On facebook multiple people can tag things in the same photo at the same time. People can be tagged as a form of communication rather than a form of classification. With its communicative and subjective nature, will this information be valuable in the long run? To who?

Here is an interesting group: tag who looks familiar takes pictures from external sources like awkwardfamilyphotos.com, posts them and encourages members to tag their friends.

When taking a look at Folksonomies, you really have to know the definition first – and of course, Wikipedia shows us the way:

A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content; this practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging. Folksonomy is a portmanteau of folk and taxonomy.

But what determines the structure of a folksonomy, is it the code, the content, or the social process?

Even though I feel code and content are key factors to the success of any online community, I think the social process is what keeps people coming back. You can have a database of the best information that anyone could possibly know, but how are people going to find that information if it is not properly index and/or tagged? In addition, who is going to tag and index all of that information for you?

The fantastic thing about social tagging is that you, as an individual, may feel that a certain piece of content fits category X and Y, but another person may feel that it fits category Y and Z. You both have a common idea that it fits category Y, but clearly neither of you thought of both category X and Z. That’s the wonderful aspect of social tagging – you may miss one or two keywords to classify code and content under, but guaranteed that someone else will pick up on it.

Great examples of this include Delicious, a social bookmarking site where users submit their favourite sites and enter in keywords which categorizes the websites for easy searches. Delicious works so well because people are constantly adding content to the website under a very easy social process, and they can discover all kinds of other interesting content thanks to the hard work of other people.

The structures of Folksonomies may be physically defined by code and content, but the social processes determine how people actually use them.

A folksonomy is the combination of the words “folk” (person) and “taxonomy” (organizing). Hence, the definition of folksonomy is generated from its direct meaning; an individual can categorize online content by creating labels called tags making it easier to retrieve information. It was created by Thomas Vander Wal, whose objective was to make the process of retrieving personal information less time consuming. Tag clouds are most often used to classify folksonomy. Tag clouds are often categorized by the most popular searches. In addition, folksonomy eliminates hierarchy and creates a flat system; it consists of terms that are related. For example, when a person wants to search for information related to a topic of their interest, they would type one or more words which relate to their area of focus. Through this system of clouding it is easier for that individual to find information related to that topic rather than having an overflow of information about irrelevant subject matters. Also, on a social scale folksonomy allows individuals to reflect on their needs and keeps up-to-date with things that are most frequently researched (popularity).

Folksonomy – a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. It is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging. It is a characteristic of Web 2.0 services that allows users to collectively classify and find information. One way to visualize tags in folksonomy is the use of tag clouds, which is I learned in my ISTB01 tutorial. (Source: Wikipedia)

In the article, Code is Law; it tells us that the governance of internet (cyberspace) comes in three forms: code, the content, or the social process. The code in cyberspace are like laws of the real world, they are software and hardware that make cyberspace what it is and also regulates it. They act as the backbone and are made to determine which people can access which digital objects. The content is the data packets – music, text, voice, images, etc. Lastly, the social process is the driving force behind the existing concepts in the cyber world.

Now which one of these governing tools determines the structure of a folksonomy? Well I think that the content of the tag is the main reason why people would choose to click and find out. The code is in the background and unseen by most people, although without it the folksonomy system wouldn’t be possible. The social process helps by popularizing the website, blog, etc. However, it is the content of the folksonomy that captures the attention of the audience. It leads them find other articles that relates to single content that they were looking for. Thus, I believe that the content is the most important part of the structure of a folksonomy.

Exercise 8.1: The 30 minute walk

As I pass through the front door the fresh autumn air reminds me that winter is fast approaching.  I turn the corner and can see the activity on Brick Lane, running perpendicular.  The contrast between that street and my own only a single block surprises me every time I move between the two.  As I approach Brick Lane I can smell the sweet scent of many curry houses cooking the first orders of the evening and hear the raucous banter of drinkers, walking up the street in cheerful groups.  As I turn the corner I see the street sign in English and Bengali and am reminded of the cultural melting pot that 21st century London is.

There is something comfortable about the narrow cobbled streets and old buildings around the Truman Brewery but I have to stay on my toes as I move in and out of the crowds as cars crawl up the narrow one-way street towards Bethnal Green road at the top of Brick Lane.  The outrageous fashions and hairstyles, quirky coffee shops and vintage clothing stores stand in contrast to the curry houses and woman in hijabs but it makes for a strange balance which grows on you very quickly.

As I exit Brick Lane and head the block back to my street I muse to myself that I will always think back fondly to these times.

I have created a Google map of my stroll at http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF&msa=0&msid=
113719407279333524030.000475c397861f50ebf86.   Use the streetview feature to take the walk yourself (drag the little man onto the map)!

Exercise 8.2: The avalanche of applications self-interview

1. Have I discovered any new tools that I will use after the course is over?

Although I have found many of the tools interesting, I don’t seem to have the time to stay on top of Facebook and Twitter let alone fly around virtual worlds in Second Life.  I suspect that unless there is some strong underlying personal or professional need that drives my participation I wont persist with anything beyond Facebook and Twitter.

2. How do I currently use social networking tools?

As an Australian who lives in London I find that I use Facebook to stay up-to-date with my friends at home.  I use Twitter professionally as a way to stay abreast of what people in my field are saying.  Sometimes these are thoughts and musings, often they are links through to interesting blogs and articles.  I am a member of Linked In but other than opening the odd update email that comes through, I don’t actively log in and probably haven’t updated my profile since 2007.

3. How can I apply what I have learned to my professional life?

As an interaction designer I find that having to design for social networking and social media is becoming more and more common as the web shifts to a more web 2.0 model.  I found the content on sociability really interesting as although I am used to designing for usability, person to person interaction has its own dynamics – particularly when creating an environment that encourages users to join and contribute.

Exercise 8.3: Data portability, FOAF and the Semantic web

1. Watched the ‘Get your data out’ video.  I don’t think that song will be going number 1 anytime soon.  For anyone curious about his pronunciation of day-ta – this is the English way of saying the word and I have been mocked many-a-time since moving to London for my Australian pronunciation of dar-ta.

2. I’m not sure that the movement of our data between sites is like a chain letter.  In my observation, people don’t typically pass on information about others on these kinds of sites (except perhaps for the odd twitter comment about someone), its more about themselves.

3. The FOAF project aims to “create a web of machine readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do” (“About FOAF”, n.d.).  This ties in well with the aims of the W3C’s Semantic Web to allow data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise and community boundaries (W3C, n.d.).  Providing the ‘meaning’ of social information and relationships via a machine readable format opens up all kinds of possibilities for web services that can do much of the work in performing tasks that can only be done manually by us today.  For example I could suggest a night out with my friends which could be negotiated and organised by our agents software that is acting on behalf of us.  Providing that the relevant information was encoded, my agent could decide who I would want to invite, and move the time around based on my availability and the importance of my other appointments based on who was available and how important it was that they came.

Exercise 8.4: Aggregation, syndication and the social engine

a) RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication and is an XML-based format for publishing web content (Winer, n.d.).  Syndication describes the practice of producing content which is published through multiple outlets (“Syndicate”, n.d.), aggregation is simply the “act of collecting together” (“Aggregation”, n.d.).  In the context of the web, these concepts describe how content is published out using RSS to be viewed in many different contexts, often in readers that create an aggregation of syndicated content from many sources, representing to a user newly-published content that is interesting to them.

These concepts have changed the way that people follow and consume information from the early web which was more aligned with traditional media and publishing channels to a far more dynamic and personalised view, allowing users to negotiate vast amounts of content to find information that is interesting to them.

I use the web-based Google Reader tool which allows me to subscribe to RSS feeds simply by searching for them and clicking the ‘Subscribe’ button shown in the results listing.  I also interact with Podcasts via iTunes, again performing searches and then clicking the relevant ‘Subscribe’ button.

The swarm concept at digg provides a dynamic and real-time view of popular content according to the number of people who are reading (swarming around) it.  The stack is another dynamic view that shows article read counts being incremented as they are being ‘digged’.  I can’t help but think of this as a virtual parallel to people wandering over to a crowd of people to see what the fuss is about which in turn draws more people in to see what the fuss is about!

b) Delicious is a similar concept to Digg in that it acts as a crowd-driven moderator by bubbling popular items up to the surface.  It is less transient in nature however as it also allows users to tag and describe their bookmarks – creating an extremely valuable folksonomy with a rich set of crowd-sourced information from many people.  This has wonderful potential for workgroups as the informal knowledge references that each individual brings to the group can be consolidated in a way that can be leveraged by everyone in the workgroup.  This creates a valuable resource that represents much of the knowledge of the group that is visible and easily accessed by all.  The concept of a tag is fundamental to the creation of a folksonomy and refers a meta-data label that someone gives to something that describes what it is.  In some ways this is not unlike the concept of a markup tags that web publishers will be familiar with as it is essentially meta-data that describes the meaning of something – one however is a pre-defined construct of a markup language and the other is a fluid categorisation concept.

c) GoToWeb20.net provides a similar service to what has been discussed above for Digg and Delicious, its focus is however on Web 2.0 applications rather than ‘content’.  This is quite novel and extremely useful.  I am already a big advocate of light-weight, web-based tools as opposed to bloated ‘Enterprise’ software and given the vast volume of applications and categories that I can see here, I would be surprised if a couldn’t find some kind of application to suit most contexts and needs for a group of people who are working together – whether in the same room or across the world.

d) The Elgg social engine is a web application that runs on an Apache/PHP/MySQL platform and provides the configurable building blocks from which new social networking sites can be created via the administration interface (or application programming interface for the brave!).  This would definitely be a valuable application to have in the workplace.  As it is highly customisable it can be tailored to the specific needs of the organisation and has the potential to be a repository for profile and contact information, blogs, groups and files, activity feeds (these could help managers keep track of what their teams are working on) and social bookmarking to mention a few.

About FOAF. (n.d.). Retrieved October 20, 2009, from http://www.foaf-project.org/about.

Aggregation. (n.d.). Retrieved October 21, 2009, from http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aggregation.

Syndicate. (n.d.). Retrieved October 21, 2009, from http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/syndicate.

W3C. (n.d.). W3C Semantic Web Activity. Retrieved October 20, 2009, from http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/.

Winer, D. (n.d.). RSS 2.0 specification. Retrieved October 21, 2009, from http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html.

When I was a kid, social tagging meant running around the school yard as fast as you could and finding another fast moving body to catch up with and tag, while shouting the ancient proclamation:  “Tag!  You’re it!”  Today, tagging means applying a label or tag to a picture, post or other data file so that when others search for like items on the internet with that particular tag, your picture or post will be among those retrieved.

Since Dewey invented his famous Decimal System there have been few challenges to his method of classifying information.  But since about 2004, the paradigm has begun to evolve into the more nebulous, ethereal “tag cloud” approach, where data with similar tags blend, overlap and intertwine in the vaporous expanse of  cyberspace.  Thus when you type in a search term  such as “kitty” into a search box, any other data files that have the same or related tags will be drawn in together in one wide search net.

This system of taxonomic classification depends much less on assignment of terms by scholars, and more on the tags assigned by everyday people.  The two words – taxonomy and folk have thus been combined into one new word never seen before now – Folksonomy.

What is it?

In his article for the NY Times Magazine dated December 2005, Daniel Pink describes the evolution of Folksonomy as a new classification system.  The term  Folksonomy – or a people’s taxonomy, was first used  by  Thomas Vander Wal, an information architect and Internet developer.  (Pink, 2005)

Folksonomy uses tagging to organize data by concepts. For example, users who post their photos on sites such as Flickr  label them with descriptive words and the pictures naturally fall into categories.

According to Van Der Wal, “People aren’t really categorizing information. They’re throwing words out there for their own use.”  “ But” (the article  states)  “the cumulative force of all the individual tags can produce a bottom-up, self-organized system for classifying mountains of digital material.” (Pink, 2005)

“Grass-roots categorization, by its very nature, is idiosyncratic rather than systematic. That sacrifices taxonomic perfection but lowers the barrier to entry. Nobody needs a degree in library science to participate.” (Pink, 2005)

Famous institutions are getting on board, such as the Art Museum Community Cataloging Project, officials from the Guggenheim, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and others.  These establishments are allowing patrons to add their own folksonomies to the curators’ specialized terminology.   Amazon is also using folksonomic classification to allow readers to classify books. ” On the great library shelf in the sky, Melvil Dewey cannot be amused.” (Pink, 2005)

Retrieved 9-25-09 from http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/11ideas1-21.html?_r=1

Estou aqui enlouquecendo trabalhando na minha dissertação (aqui em PT, tese) de mestrado e resolvi compartilhar um pouco dessa experiência. É um trabalho violento e árduo, mas espero que valha a pena.

Espero que depois que pronta eu consiga publicar (em conferências INTERNACIONAIS) e participar de concursos de dissertações de mestrado da SBC. Poderia ter feito isso já com o TCC da graduação aqui mas do ponto de vista de Recuperação de Informação o que eu fiz como estudo de caso foi muito pequeno (só prova de conceito, praticamente um toy example) e eu não dei prosseguimento ao sistema. Isso tudo feito às pressas pra conseguir o grau antes de ir pra Recife pro mestrado, apesar do 10 unânime de uma banca cabulosa lá da UFAL (modéstia à Marte).

Além disso, tive que aprender Recuperação de Informação (RI) e Aprendizagem de Máquina (AM) sozinho! Só por isso já mereço um prêmiozinho…

Nuvem de tags - ORGANIZE A WEB, MOTHAFUCKA

Bom, o assunto da dissertação: Folksonomias e Sugestão de tags. Construí (?) um sistema que extraiu dados do Delicious e depois usei técnicas de RI, AM e outras coisas. Usei como base da sugestão de tags pra páginas Web o conteúdo textual (implementado, preciso e lindo!), páginas vizinhas (inbound pages) (80% implementado) e informação do WordNet e ontologias (Aqui há dragões no código! Trabalhando nisso!). No final faço uma comparação entre as tags que sugeri e as tags do Delicious pra dar uma medida quantitativa do quanto o sistema é bom e uma análise do comportamento do usuário (p. ex. que tipo de tags o sistema NUNCA vai sugerir: “semweb” e “webdev” fica difícil).

Já passei do nível de loucura com esse sistema, o que pode ser melhor visto na quantidade de linhas de código da bagaça (inclui somente .java, código e testes). Mas vamo nessa, não desisto NUNCA!

Ia colocar o abstract aqui, mas como é um trabalho não-publicado (malditos revisores animais, alguns nem entenderam o sistema) vou deixar pra depois pra falar dos louros que consegui com o trabalho.

Boa noite, boa sorte (pra mim)!

I found this article by using Delicious when we were first learning about social bookmarking.

Entitled the Seven Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking, this article very briefly describes in layman’s terms the who what where when how and why of social bookmarking and Folksonomy.

If anyone didn’t understand what was going on in class, or the concept of how social bookmarking works; this is the place to go.  Although it started out with a rather silly introduction that basically said see Dr. Smith use Bookmarks on his computer and browser.  See Dr. Smith lose his bookmarks and become completely unorganized… See Dr. Brown’s superior skills at tagging by using Delicious.com. See how Dr. Brown never loses her tags and can use other users’ tags.

The one thing that the article did bring up however that I found interesting was how the uses and terms of social bookmarking are converging in with other forms of media.  For example the term tagging is used in things like windows photo gallery to help users organize and locate photos, as well as other social sites where you can “tag” other users in photographs, the person’s name becomes a bookmark category/tag that other users can use to find pictures of that person.

Michiel Mol, known for his Spyker Formula One team, is creating a new service called Flogs. Flogs is an iCal service, which integrates into Google Calendar, Apple’s iCal and can even send updates to the CrackBerry. The service is similar to iCal World, although the former includes exclusive data which is tailored to the user.

I’m wondering what the business model is, possibly advertising.

WOW…THIS IS THE FIRST TIME THAT I’M HEARING THIS TERM…WOW IMAGINE THE NEW THINGS THAT YOU LEARN…OK..WELL LET’S GET TO THE ANSWER…WHAT IS A FOLKSONOMY…IT IS BASICALLY A WAY TO MANAGE CONTENT. TAKE A BLOG AS A CASE IN POINT OR RSS FEEDS…YOU NEED A SYSTEM IN ORDER TO CATEGORIZE THE INFORMATION YOU COLLECT. WHEN YOU COLLECT INFORMATION YOU NORMALLY PLACE A TAG ON IT, SO THAT YOU KNOW WHAT YOU WILL BE LOOKING FOR IN THE FUTURE.

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

HONESTLY, IF YOU HAD REALLY IMPORTANT INFORMATION ON A BLOG OR A SITE AND COULDN’T FIND IT YOU WOULD BE MAD. I THINK IT’S IMPORTANT, BECAUSE IT HELPS US BE ORGANIZED AND HELPS WITH FINDING INFORMATION…THIS MAJOR IS THE MANAGEMENT OF INFORMATION AND FOLKSONOMIES ARE JUST OTHER WAYS OF HELPING TO DEFINE THE MAJOR. IN ADDITION I READ THAT A TAG CLOUD IS APART OF A FOLKSONOMY…I THINK THAT IS REALLY USEFUL FOR VISUAL PEOPLE. IT IS EASIER TO FIND THINGS WHEN YOU HAVE THEM ALL RIGHT THERE…CASE IN POINT IS THE TAG CLOUD ON TWITTER

  Folksonomies are more about browsing than finding and a great deal of information can be found in this way.Also, folksonomies are created by users. This makes them relatively cheap and highly scalable, unlike more formal methods of adding metadata. Often users find that it is not a case of ‘folksonomy or professional classification’ but ‘folksonomy or nothing’. Futhermore, folksonomies is created from community and feedback. The creation process is quick and responsive to user needs, new words can become well used in days. I think content majorly determines the structure of Folksonomies. Because the users themselves selecte the categorization they wish to attach to their articles.