Then each went to his own home

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.

Clarification

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:

Right tool: Use bookmarks to get things done

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.

Right tool: Sharing links

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.

Wrong tool: Remembering potentially interesting links

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.

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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:

Paolo Valdemarin:

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…)

Matt Mower:

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

David Weinberger:

Tagging like it was 2002

Thomas Vander Wal:

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.

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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…)

There is an enormous diversity in the landscape of social bookmark managers. Nonetheless most of the bloggers tend to stick to del.icio.us.
I rarely hear bloggers writing about another service than delicious. With this post I present two alternatives (RawSugar and Simpy) and want to prove that a spreading of users to alternative services could improve the world of tagging in general.
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Statistics is a broad mathematical discipline which studies ways to collect, summarize and draw conclusions from data. [Wikipedia]

Statistics help us to draw conclusions from data. In a way this whole tagging thing just popped up and now we are trying to figure out what really is happening. I think statistics can help us to understand tags.

When I did set up my performance test system I wanted to know the metrics of delicious so I did try to extrapolate some hand collected data but it didn’t turn out that well.

After that I started collecting post data from del.icio.us and am happy to announce that I’ve set up a site with delicious statistics that is fully automated (my hands can rest now..). There are trends about number of posts per day as well as numbers of tags per post.
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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.
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Lately it became very silent around del.icio.us. There are some new features but nothing groundbreaking. Either people are used to it and use it as a daily tool and there’s no need for new things or otherwise folks just don’t have faith in the future of del.icio.us.

I am a big fan of delicious. I’ve got 1.5K bookmarks there, I like it’s spirit and how open everything is. This article isn’t meant to criticize, but I think delicious is facing some problems.
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When you tag an item, for instance a bookmark, you give them different tags, for instance I tagged the bookmark for “How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly, and Learn Complex Material More Easily” (you know this link if you give attention to delicious popular.. :-)) with

“writing”, “toread”, “productivity”, “language”

Now what instantially pops into my mind is, that the tag “toread” is quite different from the other tags. In fact it is something I want to do with this bookmark further on. I name this type of tag “adjective” (I will come back to that name later on..). The other tags I consider as “categories“.
Now you’ll probably say “ah, this is a rare exception”. This is not true. I often tag items with “blog” because it happens that the interesting page I found about my favourite hobby happens to be a blog. Therefore I named this type of tag as “adjective” as it is rather a description to the item than it is a category to it.
Other tags used often as adjectives are “reference”, “tutorial”, “fun”, “cool”, “news”, “free”..
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In my previous article named “Tags: database schemas” we analysed different database schemas on how they could meet the needs of tag systems. In this article, the focus is on performance (speed). That is: if you want to build a tagsystem that performs good with about 1 million items (bookmarks for instance), then you may want to have a look at the following result of my performance tests.
In this article I tested tagging of bookmarks, but as you can tag pretty much anything, this goes for tagging systems in general.

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