David Weinberger of Everything-is-Miscellaneous delivered the 2008 Bertha Bassam Lecture at the University of Toronto a few weeks ago. This is now available as a video - Knowledge at the End of the Information Age. Recommended.
Using tags to improve the Flickr experience By Daniel Terdiman, WebWare (Apr 24)
Describes Flickr's The Commons project.
"This is a project that launched in January with the U.S. Library of Congress as a pilot partner. The idea was that the Library of Congress provided a large collection of archival photos for the Flickr community to add tags to for additional context.
The reach of the Flickr community was immediately obvious, she suggested. The project launched with no tags, and within an hour, users had added 150 tags. Within three hours, the number was 767 and by the end of 24 hours, fully 11,000 tags. "
Information Trapping for Tags: Thagoo ResearchBuzz (Oct 7)
"If you’re looking for more tag sites to do information trapping, check out Thagoo. It’s a tag meta-search site that offers RSS feeds for search results."
Thagoo really is a metasearcher of social bookmarking sites - BlogMarks, del.icio.us, Mr Wong, MyWebYahoo - more. Hope it's around for a while.
thagoo - meta-search for social bookmark sites, EdTech Post, 29May07
Thagoo - another way to search for tags at social bookmarking sites - not bad.
Also - the EdTechPost blog has other interesting entries on tagging and search.
Tageru is a new tool from the inventive Surfwax people. It searches for tags at 43Things, Del.icio.us, Digg, Flickr, Furl, Wink, Wikipedia. But it does this with a lookahead feature that can anticipate what you want, or make suggestions.
Mentioned in Tageru: Bringing a Bit of Control to Seven Tagging Services, Resourceshelf.
Information Retrieval in Folksonomies: Search and Ranking, by Andreas Hotho, Robert J¨aschke, Christoph Schmitz, Gerd Stumme - Knowledge & Data Engineering Group, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science,
University of Kassel (2006?)
Abstract. Social bookmark tools are rapidly emerging on the Web. In such systems users are setting up lightweight conceptual structures called folksonomies. The reason for their immediate success is the fact that no specific skills are needed for participating. At the moment, however, there exists no foundational research for these systems. We present a formal model and a new search algorithm for folksonomies, called FolkRank, that exploits the structure of the folksonomy. The proposed algorithm is also applied to find communities within the folksonomy and is used to structure search results. All findings are demonstrated on a large scale dataset.
For a very condensed view of the paper, see the short presentation on IR in Folksonomies.
In considering the components of an algorithm for searching folksonomies, this article gives us some pointers on the value of folksonomies and some weaknesses.
+ "... two motivating observations: (a) folksonomies can augment the rigid structure of corporate knowledge management, adding individual statements about resources which can be used for ranking search results, and (b) from this additional structure, recommendations for intranet users can be extracted."
+ "The systems can be distinguished according to what kind of resources are supported. Flickr, for instance, allows the sharing of photos, del.icio.us the sharing of bookmarks, CiteULike3 and Connotea4 the sharing of bibliographic references, and 43Things 5 even the sharing of goals in private life. Our own
upcoming system, called BibSonomy,6 will allow to share simultaneously bookmarks and bibtex entries."
+ Premise to the FolkRank algorithm: "The basic notion is that a resource which is taggedwith important tags by important users becomes important itself. The same holds, symmetrically, for tags and users, thus we have a graph of vertices which are mutually reinforcing each other by spreading their weights."
+ On the influence of number of users: "On the other hand, the results also show that the current size of folksonomies on the web is still prone to being skewed by a relatively small number of perturbations – a single user, at the moment, can influence the emergent understanding of a certain topic in the case that a sufficient number of different points of view for such a topic has not
been collected yet. We expect that similar results could be obtained analysing other folksonomy tools. Furthermore, with the growth of folksonomies on the web, the influence of single users will fade in favor of a common understanding provided by huge numbers of users."
However, it doesn't appear that FolkRank has been turned into a tool we can use to search del.icio.us and the others.
Search Is a Folksonomy, Snarkmarket (Feb 6)
Here's a thought - "Every search a user performs could be seen as a tag she’s applying to the result she ultimately clicks on. Over time, you could imagine a page featuring a tag cloud formed of all the searches that got people to that page."
Followed by a comment from a reader -- "Actually that's where the real value in folksonomy lies I think - where it combines with search tracking and taxonomies."
TagBulb Features Massive Tag Metasearch, ResearchBuzz (Feb 6)
TagBulb offers tag searching across several sources - bookmarks, blogs, videos, etc - but it displays engine by engine. Some of the meta-search groups are very small: blogs has only Technorati and Google.
Tara Calishain says, "I would use this engine for more of an overview of what’s out there, as it isn’t comprehensive — it lists only two blog search engines, for example, while Zuula lists four (and of course Zuula isn’t comprehensive either.)"
I was searching on folksonomies and came upon an interesting article from Yahoo News through TagBulb -- Tagging: 'Next-Stage Search Phenomenon' Webpronews (Feb 1)
Tagging, Pew Internet and American Life (Feb 1)
"A December 2006 survey has found that 28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorize online content. "
Described in Tagging 'takes off for web users' , BBC News (Feb 1)
"Tagging or labelling online content is becoming the new search tool of choice among web users, shows research."