Then each went to his own home

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.

And now to something completely different (No, I won’t post cat photos now)

Trackbacks are out, unfortunately. Probably due to a misuse of spammers a lot of blogs have closed their trackback ping urls.
However, as I want to know what is currently written about my articles: criticism, praise or different views or whatever, I need to somehow track new referrers to my blog. I tried different solutions that all weren’t satisfying:

• I tried to skim through my awstats statistics but it was a pain to extract the new trackbacks from the old ones. Awstats way of displaying referrers is ok to have an idea of how my visitors reach my site but it falls short in showing me new referrers.
• I created a watch list at technorati, but it seems to track just a portion of the whole cake.

I ended up writing a python script for it. As a beginner in python, programming this task was easy enough to have a good result in small time.
In the danger of presenting the 1324th solution to this problem I hereby present my script. If you already have got a solution I’d be interested since I didn’t find any service or blog post concerning this problem. (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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Once upon a time I asked a question on the del.icio.us mailing list if Joshua could give me some stats of his bookmark webservice.
He didn’t. And so I thought I’d do some extrapolation to gain some stats.
And eventually you help me thinking so we together could have some collaborative stats. (more…)

While setting up the promised performance test in my last post, I did some tests with the MySQL fulltext features and it seems that they are built for tagging systems. Take a look at the queries (if it is not clear for you what is done here, please read my previous post).
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