In my last post I argued that online bookmarking services (delicious, simpy, ma.gnolia et al.) are the wrong tool for remembering web pages with no clear future usage.
I guess the altered xkcd comic sums it up best:
As a consequence I just considered solutions that don’t make me decide which page I want to store and which not. Everything has to be stored automatically for me.
One common task while browsing the web is making sure you will be able to recall a valuable information you are just looking at. This article aims to prove that social bookmarking as in delicious, simpy, magnolia et al. is the wrong tool for that task.
According to comments here and on reddit, it was obvious that my intention of this post was somehow misunderstood – partly because of the original misleading title (was: “.. – 5 reasons why social bookmarking doesn’t work”). Maybe these adaptions from an xkcd comic does clarify:
I think, derefr sums this up very nice:
I find a GTD approach works well: what next action are you going to apply to this bookmark? If it’s just “well, it was neat!” you have no reason to save it (perhaps share it, but not save it), and can throw it away.
The same goes for using the tag “mycomment” to follow up discussions you’ve partaken or “toread” to know what to read once you’ve got some free time. These bookmarks all serve a purpose that is clear to you while bookmarking. This also helps you picking an appropriate tag. No critique on that one.
It is clear that bookmark sharing sites such as reddit, Digg, or Stumbleupon that all focus on link sharing have proven that this concept works. Delicious, Simpy, Magnolia et al. all have features to help you share your bookmarks. No critique on that one.
This is what this article is dealing about: Saving bookmarks that are not useful to you now but – without yet knowing what you’ll use this bookmark for – you save it because it is potentially interesting in the future. I think that doesn’t work and the 5 points should prove that.
I’m very happy that a recent post titled «Tag history and gartners hype cycles» stirred up a discussion in the
folksonomy-blog-space that got some people musing about the state of tagging:
4 years later I’m still wondering when will we get some truly advanced tagging tools.
Where are all these tools to manage all my tags (on Flickr, on del.icio.us, on technorati, in my RSS reader, on my blog, etc), to help me organizing them, to allow me to gain more advantages from tagging? (maybe they are somewhere and I simply have not found them yet…)
I have been surprised, that [...] the state of the art in tagging seems firmly wedged in 2003. Surprised because there seemed [...] to be a momentum building in the use of tagging
Tagging like it was 2002
In the consumer space thing have been stagnant for a while, but in the enterprise space there is some good forward movement and some innovation taking place
[...]
While there are examples that tagging services have moved forward, there is so much more room to advance and improve. As people’s own collection of tagged pages and objects have grown the tools are needed to better refind them.
Vander Wals post is very very insightful and worth a read: He sums up the tagging history and expresses a few brilliant ideas how to proceed.
When Julian Cash told me in an email that he was very gateful for the paper Frank, Grigory and I wrote, he asked me for my snail mail address. I wondered what he wanted my address for, then one or two weeks later I found a block of plexiglas in my mail.
Thanks a lot to Julian for showing such appreciation. It showed me that my labour has implications to real life too. Holding a physical gift in my hand, coming from work done in a virtual blogosphere feels special.
Btw: He also thanked Frank for his part by sending him an inflated ball.
In beginning of May at webtuesday, I gave a presentation about the current problems with tags and what could be done to improve that situation.
Corsin was kind enough to record the presentation (thanks a lot for that!). I’m not completely happy with the presentation – especially the part about tag history was way too long. I’d suggest to skip that part and read my blog post about this subject (this part probably works better in a blog post than in a presentation). Ah, and the last 3 or 4 minutes are missing but you don’t really miss something.
For last Webtuesday I gathered a few historic data of the «tag movement» (that got very quiet in the last two years).
| Feb 2002 | Delicious |
| Dez 2003 | Delicious "takes off" |
| Feb 2004 | Flickr |
| Feb 2004 | last.fm |
| Mar 2004 | spurl.net |
| May 2004 | simpy.com |
| May 2004 | furl.net |
| May 2004 | del.icio.us has 400k bookmarks |
| Jun 2004 | Flickr adds tagging |
| Aug 2004 | Vander Wal coins "folksonomy" |
| Dez 2004 | Connotea |
| Jan 2005 | Louis Rosenfeld warns that tags won’t be the answer to everything |
| Mar 2005 | Yahoo! buys Flickr |
| May 2005 | Clay Shirky: Ontology is overrated: Tags are the answer to everything |
| Jun 2005 | Yahoo! My Web 2.0 |
| Jun 2005 | YouTube – with tags |
| Aug 2005 | Flickr adds tag clustering |
| Aug 2005 | Last.fm adds tagging |
| Aug 2005 | The Wisdom Of Crowds |
| Sep 2005 | LibraryThing – tag your books |
| Oct 2005 | Ma.gnolia.com |
| Dez 2005 | Yahoo! buys Delicious |
| Dez 2006 | rawsugar closes R&D |
| Mar 2007 | buzzillions.com: faceted tagging |
Update September, 2007: Thomas Vander Wal wrote a very good roundup on the tag history.
I started a new job at local.ch in February – yeah, it’s been a while already.
Local.ch is a local search engine for Switzerland, that means I can now work on information retrieval related stuff full time – which was what I did in my free time already. Being paid for doing the things I like is a gift I don’t take for granted.
The R&D team consists of about 10 people – all very talented and smart. Plus, the atmosphere is friendly yet challenging.
Then, I’ll give a talk at webtuesday, Zurich about "Improving navigation in tag spaces": Why tag clouds don’t make much sense, why
tagging lost its ground and what could be done to improve the users experience.
The talk will be based on the few blog posts I wrote about this subject plus some newly gained insights.
If you’re living near Zurich it would be a pleasure to meet you there.
As various blogs already posted, RawSugar has closed its research and development efforts. That is, the service will still be up for a while but there won’t me new features or bugfixes (see Rawsugars announcement).
Imagine you have a closet where you store all your documents. Each time you want to archive an important document you tell your closet: “put that under important”, a magic hand, coming out of the closet, takes your document and puts it into its immense pile of documents. The other day you are in a hurry to be on time to your next meeting. You need that important document from yesterday so you ask your closet: “please show me all important documents”. Then you hear printing and rustling in the closet until, after half a minute, 20 magic hands stick out of your closet, each one holding a document, some of your documents have sticky notes on it saying: “this is not filed “important” but it is similar to a document you filed important”, another sticky note says: “these are all the other categories you put your documents in” and every document you really filed “important” has got a sticky note on the number of coworker who filed this document under “important”. You say to your self: Tomorrow I’ll reanimate my pile “important documents” that was on my desktop before they put this silly closet into my office.
That’s the feeling that arises when I think of all the bookmark services out there that ought to file urls I somehow find notworthy so that I can quickly recall them afterwards: There’s too much clutter and the services are just too slow. Therefore I again begin to save my bookmarks at other places: In firefox or in some text documents lying somewhere on my hard drive (probably I should tag them?). (more…)
Grigory Begelman (Technion – Israel Institute of Technology Computer Science Dpt), Frank Smadja (RawSugar) and I did a paper for www2006 called “automated tag clustering”. It deals with why clustering the tag space makes sense and how this could be done.
After the presentation at the tagging workshop at www2006 we felt the need to give our paper a more www-friendly, I-don’t-want-to-read-through-those-theoretical-equation-flooded-papers face.
So, here you go: Automated Tag Clustering: Improving search and exploration in the tag space. To read this document you should have a clue what tags are about, you should also know some tag services as delicious or flickr so you can understand the limitations these services currently have. (more…)
