Posts about Tagging

I’m miscellaneous

I’m an idiot. I was just writing a post recommending David Weinberger’s Everything’s Miscellaneous — which I recommend constantly to editors, publishers, technologists, and investors — and so I wanted to link to my earlier post raving about the book and its importance in society. Only I now see that I never posted it. I’d read the book in galley form and had to wait to blog about it until it was released. But then I must have thought that I had blogged about it since I had talk about it so often (and the usual order for bloggers is to write about things first and then repeat what they’ve blogged in real conversation). So I’m the absent-minded professor. My brain is miscellaneous. I need someone to tag it. I’ll pay particular attention to the ‘missing’ tag. I’m criminally late to this but I do heartily recommend David’s book to anyone who wants to understand the fundamental change in the architecture of information in society, including media, learning, and business. It’s a mind-opener and almost as fun as listening to David himself. So if you haven’t already followed someone else’s recommendation to buy Everything’s Miscellaneous, please follow mine.

Tagging tags

Jeff Pulver started quite the memealanch with tagging people to find out five thins about them. And there’ve been lot of microbios worth reading. I just wish everybody had tagged these posts so I could now go read them all. How could we forget to tag the tagging?

Tag this

My latest Guardian column is about tagging. A few bits:

Tags are a means not only to remember links, but also to discover content tagged by others, to target searches and advertising, to connect people of common interests, and even to collect the wisdom of the crowds….

But this isn’t just another valentine to just another cool online trend; we’re so over that. No, tags have a larger lesson to teach to media. They present a clear demonstration that the web is not about flat content. The web is about connections and the value that arises from them if you enable people to collect and communicate. In the old, big, centralised, controlled world of media, a few people with a few tools – pencils, presses and Dewey decimals – thought they could organise the world and its content. But as it turns out, left to its own devices, the world is often better at organising itself.

Alternate link here.

Interestingness

Thomas Hawk wonders whether Flickr’s interestingness will allow Yahoo to leap ahead of Google in at least one arena of search: photos.

I wonder two things:

First, why just photos? Couldn’t interestingess become valuable in an overall search algorithim?

But second, in an interesting comment discussion under my post yesterday on interestingness, KirkH asks whether interestingness requires that the content judged be hosted on one site. That’s a good question, for interestingness appears to be about both vectors of interest and also about relationships and I’m not sure whether or how the data to feed that algorithim can be done across a distributed network.

The best thing I saw at Web 2.0…

… wasn’t at Web 2.0 at all but instead at Web 2.1.

It’s Tagyu.

You put in text and it suggests tags. It does this by comparing the text to tags on other text via Del.icio.us and two or three more sources.

It was created by Adam Kalsey, ex of Pheedo, only last Wednesday, so it has data only since then. Even so, it’s very good.

It’s a clever use of reverse-folksonomy: Use the wisdom of the crowds to make your stuff wiser.

I would have liked to have kept this secret to myself for a few days while I figured out how all it could be used. But just now, I showed it to my son and he said, “Seen it.” It was already dugg on Digg.

: Separately, because I met Tara at Web 1.0, I got a link to a neat new face-recognition software coming.

: And Om starts to peek behind the curtain on the newly named Sphere, a different blog search. I’ll be playing with it myself soon.