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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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).

History of tags

Update September, 2007: Thomas Vander Wal wrote a very good roundup on the tag history.

(more…)

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.

Say bye to tag clouds

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.

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…)

Just a short note:
Grigory Begelman (Technion – Israel Institute of Technology Computer Science Dpt), Frank Smadja (RawSugar) and me are giving a presentation at this years www2006 conference in Edinburgh. I’m very glad our paper was accepted to the Collaborate Web Tagging Workshop. We will talk about automated tag clustering. I will give a demo of clustering popular urls. It’s like popurls grouped by categories instead of origin.

I will write more about it afterwards as I’m pretty busy finishing my demo.

If you will attend the conference, leave me a note so we could meet somewhen at the conference.
I’m looking forward to this conference as it will be my first one.

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.
(more…)

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.
(more…)

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”..
(more…)