Posts about tags

Future of news

August 28, 2006 by Jeff Jarvis
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David Weinberger boswells a chunky discussion of the future of news at Foocamp.

Adrian Holovaty from the WashingtonPost.com is interested in optimizing information collection. How do we get journalists to collect information in ways that machines can reuse it. Newspapers are a collection of information desperate for a framework, while Wikipedia is a framework desperate for information, he says. . . . Adrian says that the categorization onus should be on the reporter. All the info in it ought to be categorized so, if it’s a report on a mayor’s speech, we can see all the speeches by the mayor, all speeches about the same topic, etc.

Tag that.

Tag this

January 2, 2006 by Jeff Jarvis
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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

October 31, 2005 by Jeff Jarvis
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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.

Tag me

October 28, 2005 by Jeff Jarvis
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: Yahoo puts up its new save-this/tag-this beta.

: David Weinberger points to a service that lets you tag books. Well, of course: What happens when we don’t just tag pages but things — movies, destinations, books, gadgets… And what happens when you can get to that on the road (in the bookstore, you look for recommendations of books about…).

Of course, you can tag people.

: I have been showing everyone who’ll listen Flickr’s “interestingness,” a secret-sauce algorithim that, I believe, uses vectors of interest and link and social patterns to find the photos Flickrers find interesting. And they are interesting.

What’s great about this is that it exposes not the wisdom of the crowd but the taste of the crowd.

The best thing I saw at Web 2.0…

October 10, 2005 by Jeff Jarvis
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… 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.