Then each went to his own home

Is the revolution stuck?

When I first heard about del.icio.us (and after that few days when I didn’t get it..) I thought: “This is revolutionary”. There were many things tags made possible that were just not possible until that day.

Joshua Schachter was the guy that invented tags (or at least that’s how the story is being told). Originally thought as a way to organize ones own bookmarks the social effect became obvious:

If everyone tags, the “community” profits.

Now, we have del.icio.us. Now we organize our bookmarks with tags. And our photos.
And our books, our games, our software, our tagging sites, and also your bulldogs, if you have any.

However, as we have tagged our whole life, what do we do with it? What is it good for?
I fear the tagging-revolution is about to calm. And I believe that’s because many people don’t see the advantages in tagging. I believe that many many things can be made possible by using tag-based systems. If we realized this, tagging would get some fresh air and eventually tagging gets mainstream.

Is it just me, or is the tagging revolution really stuck? I desperately miss new, visionary, inventive articles on tags.

• To all smart people, where are your ideas?
• To all programming geeks: Where are your algorithms, your “proof of concept” web services?

I could stop here with my article, but, hey, I don’t want to be the grumbling guy that sits and waits for new things coming up, so here I am, trying to expose my brain to you.
In this article I want to take a look at what areas tags are already strong in and how tagging could gain ground in these areas.

Tags help you to organize

When Joshua came up with the idea of tags, it was purely meant for organizing. It was only when also other people started organizing by tags, when the whole idea of “folksonomy” came up.
What does organizing mean? It is like tidying ones room: You put every paper and pencil you have at a place you can remember and seems logical to you so you can easily remember where you have put that thing. Now as we are not limited into physical means when we organize data we have many new possibilities. There are already good articles about this so I won’t discuss this in detail here.

At the end of the day, the question arises: Is organizing your bookmarks by tags really that good?

Just to make the point I come up with another way to remember things: While browsing, the browser could save all pages in a cache and when you are searching for a page you have visited (which is why you originally bookmark the page anyway), you make a fulltext search through all your cached pages. It’s a kind of “Google search” over pages you have already visited. I know this would have some downsides but it would have some advantages too. I often searched for a page I bookmarked and couldn’t remember the tag I used. This problem wouldn’t occur in the “searching through cache” system.

What I am trying to say is: If tagging solely would be for organizing your stuff, it wouldn’t be worth the trouble.

Folksonomy – Classification of the masses

Folksonomy is – as I understand it – the distributed classification of data by the big mass of people who tag stuff. Folksonomy often is said as a new system to build a taxonomy. It’s like building the Open Directory by thousands of people tagging stuff.

What is folksonomy good for? Why do we want to put bookmarks into categories?

Folksonomy enables to explore

Where do you go to start building a new expertise? Is it del.icio.us? Is it Google?
Let’s say your boss tells you that the data your software saves in the database should be encoded. You didn’t think much about cryptography, it merely was a topic that you “should know about” but you were never really interested in cryptography (I’m speaking for myself here.. :-) ). You don’t really know where to start. You know you want to know something about cryptography, but you don’t know exactly what.
A good list of articles or even starting points could shorten your learning curve.
Thereafter, you may want to “travel through the cryptography universe”. And to travel means knowing which articles are related to the one you just read and are so enthusiastic about. You need a map of the cryptography universe, you want to know what is left and right, top and bottom, you want to know everything and everyone related to “cryptography”.
Now then: What would you do?

Do tag systems help you to explore?

Delicious on cryptography

I would go on del.icio.us/tag/cryptography+introduction. There I find a nice article titled “An Overview of Cryptography“. I guess I’m lucky! If I’d read the article, I’d probably find out which subtopics exist, how cryptography is related to similar issues and so on. You kind of get this “map of the cryptography” universe. But, this is done by only one author. Probably I don’t trust him (probably I should do so, after reading his cv), or you simply do not have time and/or energy to read through 44 pages, although the article looks good. I’ll probably go back to delicious and find out, that the related tags of “cryptography” are:

• security
• reference
• encryption
• crypto
• algorithms
• computing
• software
• nsa
• tutorial
• kids
• education

Now this is not very convincing, is it? You argue:

Yeah, but this is far better that what I get on Google

.

Google on cryptography

It is. When looking at this Google results I remember that Google is meant for searching when I already know what I search for. But now I am at a different stage. I don’t know exactly what to search for. I don’t know, because I don’t have any expertise in cryptography. BTW: Google does come up with an article that looks like a good introduction into cryptography as well..

Open directory on security

What about open directory? Let’s give it a try: After typing in “cryptography” I find out that this topic is classified in Science > Math > Applications > Communication_Theory > Communication Theory > Cryptography. Clicking this link you get what you were probably looking for.
You get a nice overview:

• Algorithms
• Books
• Events
• Historical
• Journals
• People
• Programming Libraries
• Research Groups
• Theory

Now you stand at a guidepost. You see the “cryptography universe”. You probably don’t see what is left and right to cryptography, but here you have a “cryptography at a glance”.
Now it’s up to you: Do you want to explore “algorithm land”, take the shortcut and download the programming library of the language of your choice? Or do you even want to get advice from people that are experts on that matter?
Even if the links provided here don’t give you what you are looking for, here you get a clue what you should look for.

Comparing the three

Let’s compare browsing to a reallife quest: Finding out where your next conference will take place. Say you want to go to the next etech conference, you don’t know where it is and you are not an American citizen.

On the conference websites they often put a map showing the conference place like 10 meters above surface. This map is helpful. But only at the point when you are quite next to the conference.

Then, when you desperately search for a more general map, you’ll possibly find a map of how it looks from outer space. Yeah, I know that San Diego is in the US, but I’d like to know which airport is next to the conference.

That’s quite similar to the views we have with del.icio.us and open directory.
Delicious would tell you: “the roads nearby are ‘union street’, ‘Broadway circle’ and ‘Broadway’…”, open directory proclaims: “we have five continents in the world: ‘America’, ‘Asia’, ‘Africa’, ‘Australia’ and ‘Europe’…”. Now, I’m exaggerating a bit but you get the point: Sometimes you need a map that lays between the too detailed and the too general map.
Looking for this type of view is like saying: “I want a bit more ontology than tags but not that much taxonomy as open directory”. That’s where I’ve put the question mark. It’s not that you always want to see the data at that distance but sometimes you desperately want to have that viewpoint.

Now, what has this to do with tagging? I believe that this missing in-between view can be won by analyzing tags.
Have you noticed how flickr does this in-between view?
When you search for love, flickr cluster asks you: “What do you mean by ‘love’?”:

• a couple kissing?
• a mother holding it’s baby?
• a red heart?

“Wait: Flickr is a bit different from del.icio.us”, you say. Yup. Flickr uses a narrow, del.icio.us a broad folksonomy system.
But I believe that the data clusters, flickr creates with it’s narrow folksonomy data, can also be generated with delicious’ broad folksonomy data. I am programming an algorithm that computes del.icio.us clusters. I’m still at an early stage but I get clusters like this “shopping cluster”:

I realize that even if the cluster data is available, there’s the question how to navigate through the data. The “zooming in” and “zooming out” won’t be as easy as with Google maps.
But anyway, here is the land no one has explored before. I think this is the area we should talk about. Here is room for improvement.

Folksonomy helps you to stay informed about a certain topic

Back to what folksonomies are good for: If you have built an expertise in cryptography, you want to stay informed. If RSA is hacked, you certainly want to be informed.
Delicious has got an “Inbox” where you can subscribe to a tag, e.g. “cryptography”.
Each bookmark that is tagged “cryptography” gets in your inbox. That’s a great way to stay informed. Alternatively you have a list of of recent popular sites tagged “cryptography”. You can subscribe to this lists using RSS and hopefully you get informed timely if RSA is hacked..

Do tag systems keep you informed?

I think the comparison with the distance to the data applies here too:
If I’d subscribe to cryptography, I’d probably miss some important items, just because the guy who bookmarked it used the tag “crypto”. On the other hand, I do not want to be informed about another Rijndael algorithm, I want to narrow the incoming links to articles or essays that deal with cryptography.
Delicious already offers to narrow results: I could subscribe to «cryptography» and «essay», and, when delicious will support union (and it will, as Joshua promises), I also could have subscribe to (cryptography or crypto) and (essay or article) but you see that it doesn’t really solve the problem.
I imagine that one day you can say:

I want to keep being informed about cryptography

and the service asks you:

Should I keep you informed about

• new implementations
• new articles/essays
• security issues

And I believe this is possible. Flickr already asks you this when you are searching for love pictures. I guess it will be based on clusters again.

Tags help you sharing Lists

Back to what tags are good for: They help you building lists. Let’s name a few examples:

• Wish lists: I know that numerous online shops enable you building whishlists. But I’d like to have a whishlist that’s not bound to a company, that I can arrange and rearrange. Many are already using del.icio.us as a storage of their wish list.
• Share your bookmarks: A friend asked me for some links to javascript WYSIWYG editors. I gave him a list of all my bookmarks tagged javascript and editor
• Offer viewpoints of your data: Let’s say your favourite CMS features tagging (featured in many of those new fancy ruby on rails applications), I’m not speaking about blogs here: To allow “normal” visitors to view your data, you’ll add a navigation providing starting points to your entries; specific locations a visitor can jump in to so he could take bathe in your articles. Probably you would add a link to all items tagged “references” and “networking” to achieve that.

How can tag lists be improved?

I’m often annoyed that I cannot put my del.icio.us links in a specific order. I did a little script that puts my newest bootkmark at the bottom but it doesn’t fully solve the problem.
Actually I’d like being able to compose a view of tagged bookmarks, i.e. I want to offer a list of all firms our company has built the network for:

Networking references

Big firms

• UBS
• Migros
• ABB

Medium-sized firms

• Stadlerrail
• Räber Information Management GmbH

Small firms

• Citrin Informatik GmbH
• Goldschmiedeatelier Thildy Keller
• Mini Fruits Trading

Nowadays, such a list can’t be automatically generated from my bookmarks, but it could be, by letting me configure my view as myView = (references+networking, "Networking References", (big_firms, medium-sized_firms, small_firms)).
I know it’s not a big challenge to program such a thing, but nonetheless it doesn’t exist, as far as I know?

Bottom line

It appears to me that there’s not been much progress being done related to tagging systems lately. What rather became better is the embedding of tagging systems into already existing technologies such as search. It gives the impression that core issues are done and that there’s no much room for improvement. In this article I wanted to disprove this.
I think that there’s much much more than I have written in here, I even believe that todays tagging applications cover just about 5% of all the possible features tagging makes possible. Thus, let’s gain ground.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 29th, 2005 at 9:54 pm and is filed under Clustering, Del.icio.us, Tags. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.