There can be no arguments about it, machine tags are cool and they solve problems. And now they work in WordPress with bSuite too (svn only, for the moment).

It’s not just because flickr popularized them that I like them, though it helps and you should definitely look at that stuff:

• The announcement
• Excitement from O’Reilly Radar, ProgrammableWeb, and Dan Catt (who championed the concept at flickr, I think).

Part of what I like about machine tags is that they bring some more structure (but not too much) to the folksonomic ecosystem. I’m not sure how many of the 292 named flickr mashups use machine tags, but there’s a lot of possibility in them.

For my part, I added machine tag support to bSuite because Scriblio needed it. And it was a message on the Scriblio mail list that kicked me into gear to make it work.

The short story is that you simply put “tags:” in the subject or body and anything that follows becomes a tag. It’s worth remembering that the Subject of the email becomes the title and the body becomes the description. The longer story is at Flickr.

tagging, flickr, uploading

I was honored to join the conversation yesterday for the latest Talis Library 2.0 Gang podcast, this one on folksonomies and tags. The MP3 is already posted and, as usual, it makes me wonder if I really sound like that. Still, listen to the other participants, they had some great things to say and made it a smart discussion.

I approached the conversation with the notion that what we were really talking about was whether libraries should give their patrons the opportunity to organize the resources they value in ways that make sense to them. For some time one of our patrons here has been telling us he wants all the books that he’s interested on one shelf, and for years the standard retort has been a chuckle. But, why, he might today ask, can’t our library systems make this possible in some virtual way now?

Tags — specifically user contributed tags — are a big element in this larger question. Though they bring up all manner of concerns from authority to vocabulary control, they’ve shown great value outside libraries and interest in them has been energized with the active discussions about how to re-imagine our library catalogs for today’s needs.

My big question is who “owns” those tags, and what motivates taggers. LibraryThing, has enjoyed some great success with tags, while Amazon has achieved little. Tim Spalding’s theory on the matter echos Josh Porter’s dissection of “The Del.icio.us Lesson,” where he notes that “personal value precedes network value.” That is, people tag for personal, perhaps even selfish reasons. People don’t tag to help the community, they tag because it helps the tagger.

I’ve been tagging my stories at MaisonBisson for some time now, and the effort has paid off by making my content more findable both internally and externally at services like Technorati. Flickr makes tagging even more valuable, as the tags are often the only searchable content for image. How else could I find my library-related photos if not from the tags?

On the other hand, my own experiment in user contributed tags seems to have fallen flat, as I’ve received very few useful tags despite the high number of readers who I’d expect to be familiar with tagging. Meanwhile, del.icio.us tells me that there are 133 tagged bookmarks to MaisonBisson in their database. This leaves me wondering if I should invest more effort in working on user contributed tag system that lives in my blog (or or a library catalog, or other discrete system), or should I instead focus on making those systems support outside tagging systems like del.icio.us? This is easy for my blog, where all the pages are already URL addressable, but bibliographic systems are a bigger challenge.

update: hey, Abby’s talking about this over at Thingology and her headline is way better than mine. Darn. Still, the point remains: we need to leverage our systems to make it easy for our patrons organize the things they like wherever and however they wish. Then, we should look for ways to find value in the aggregate. That’s the del.icio.us lesson.

folksonomies, folksonomy, interview, l2, lib20, libraries, library, library 2.0, library catalogs, library systems, opacs, podcast, tagging, tags, talis, talking with talis

Ross Singer gets the prize for submitting the first reader contributed tag, the latest feature in bsuite.

There are arguments about whether user-contributed tags are useful or even valid, or whether they should be stored in my site or aggregated at places like del.ici.ous. But who’s to worry about such questions? Who’s to worry when you can put together the work already done to support author’s tags with WordPress’s pretty good comment system and get user contributed tag support with just a few extra lines of code? Who’s to worry when we can try it and see what comes of it?

It’s all managed using the same tools we use to approve, moderate, and edit comments, which also means the spam filtering that works for comments works for contributed tags too. And because bsuite is already part of WPopac, that means it gains the new tagging features too (well, it will soon).

bsuite, collabulary, folksonomy, tag, tagging, tags, user contributed, wisdom of the crowd, wpopac

Flickr does tags better than any other, so far as I can tell.

We love tag folksonomies for way they allow us all to organize our world, for the way they allow patterns to emerge from chaos, and for their easy flexibility. But that flexibility, if poorly implemented in our software, can interrupt the very patterns we hope to find in our tag networks.

Take “road trip” as an example. What one tagger thinks is two words might be just “roadtrip” to another. This is where Flickr’s tag indexing does it right: we still have to pick the right words (and spelling), but we don’t have to worry about spaces or punctuation.

So, when I tag a photo “Mt. Moosilauke,” Flickr stores the both text I enter as well as a version in all lower-case, without spaces or punctuation: “mtmoosilauke.” And when you search for “Mt. Moosilauke,” you get the same results as your neighbor searching for “mt moosilauke.”

Well, that’s how I think tags should work, anyway. And you’ll notice it’s how they’re working here now. The text of the tags at the bottom of this post and all others here displays as I entered it, but they resolve to a tag URL without spaces or punctuation, just as Flickr’s do.

Um…update: okay, Matty and I agree and disagree about a few things, but he just re-wrote the core-tagging function in bsuite, so I’ve gotta give him his way on a thing or two for a moment. So…tags are back to the broken Technorati standards. That is, somebody searching for “roadtrip” won’t find posts tagged “road trip,” but we’ll fix that in time.

folksonomy, folksonomies, tag, tags, Flickr, tagging, doing it right, Best Practice

Ignore the politics for a moment. MoveOn’s CTO, Patrick Michael Kane, remarked that the organization’s membership to Flickr, the photo sharing site, has paid off: “Flickr has got to be the best $24.95 we’ve ever spent.”

Why?

Micah Sifry explains in a story at AlterNet that MoveOn had been soliciting photos of events from members for some time, but their ability to move those photos through the process and make them available to the public was limited. The irony, for an organization built on grass roots participation, is that they couldn’t deal with the photos people were submitting from events and actions. So they started looking at Flickr, which now hosts over 80 million photos.

The group started using the service in April 2005, and now hosts almost 9000 photos at Flickr. MoveOn allows members to submit photos via email, then then uses a review application based on the Flickr API that allows other members to vote for photos to be posted on the public site. Those reviewers can also push some photos to the top of the pile by tagging them “great”.

As it turns out, tags (folksonomies) are among the most valuable features for MoveOn. Kane explains: “one of our campaigners wanted a slideshow of photos from a recent action and was able to put it together himself, just by selecting the tags he was interested in and using the Flickr slideshow app.”

Again, ignore the politics. Look at this carefully and tell me if there’s any better application to meet their needs. Now tell me how social software can better meet your organizations needs.

Need help? Here’s Sifry’s conclusion:

The larger lesson for other organizations is this: As social networking sites like Flickr, del.icio.us (also just bought by Yahoo!), and MySpace attract millions of users, it may make sense to go where the people already are and start playing with the same tools, not only because those tools may offer all kinds of benefits to the organization, but also to see what unexpected benefits may engage people. What MoveOn is doing with Flickr is just a beginning.

social software, flickr, moveon, social applications, tags, tag, tagging, social software for politics, leveraging social software

bsuite, the follow-up to bstat, now includes a module called “bsuggestive” that recommends related posts based on the current post’s tags or alternate posts based on your search words when you arrive from a recognized search engine.

That is, bsuggestive does two neat things:

First, visitors will see a section in each post with links to other posts on your site that have similar content. The “similarity” is judged by comparing the current posts tags against the content and titles of all other posts in the database. This requires tags, and I’ll explain that later.

Second: visitors who arrive at your site from a search engine will see a list of other posts that closely match the original search words used at that search engine. This is especially helpful when people arrive at your front page or an archive page that may include a number of posts not related to the search query.
The big downside to all of this is that it (at least part of it) requires tags, and there’s no standardized support for tags in WordPress.

What to do? Easy: bsuite automatically recognizes any links with a rel=“tag” attribute as a tag. A little iffy: bsuite has adopted the simpletags approach to tagging. This is “iffy” because you should disable the simpletags plugin if you’re already using it (running both will needlessly increase CPU usage, but won’t do anything “bad”).

tags: bstat, bsuite, content tagging, plugin, related content, tag, tag management, tagging, tags, wordpress, wordpress plugin

David Weinberger at Many-to-Many pointed me to Tom Coates’ post about different schools of thought regarding tags. Coates has been thinking about tags as keywords, annotations. Thats how I’ve been using and thinking about tags too, but some people have different ideas.

…At the end of the argument I said to Joshua that it was almost like he was treating tags as folders. And he replied, exasperated, that this was exactly what they were.

Exasperation aside, Coates is pretty sure that Joshua’s view is loosing currency and the keywords view is growing.

Wienberger offers this explanation: we use tags as folders to organize things for ourselves, but we use tags as keywords as a way to contribute to the social understanding of things. That’s what Yahoo’s Social Search is trying to leverage.

Related: Google’s War On Hierarchy.

tags: annotating, annotations, culture war, david weinberger, folders, folksonomy, keywords, schools of thought, search, social search, tag, tag cloud, tagging, tags, taxonomy, tom coates, yahoo social search

Who doesn’t love tagging? No, tagging as in annotating, not graffiti. Anyway, Rixome is the latest among a bunch of plans/projects to enable tagging of geographic spaces/real-life environments.

The good people at We Make Money Not Art had this in their post:

rixome is a network and a tool that turns mobile screens into windows that show the virtual and public dimensions of our point of view.

A walker (a rixome user) can see on his/her mobile phone/PDA/laptop screen the virtual interventions that have been added to the location where s/he now stands. For example, a spoken message can be left on a given location for other “walkers” to hear through headphones whenever they pass by. The message can also be written, or it can be a 3D animation or image, a photography, a drawing, a video.

Remote rixome users can also check vía Internet the traces left by others but s/he won’t be able to add an intervention similar to those published in situ.

Developed by gelo for his at Master of Art and New Technologlies at the Universidad Europea de Madrid.

(Engadget is onto this story too)

This idea isn’t new (see Twenty Years From Now: Urban tagging and New Media Knowledge – GeoTagging The City) But time, technology, and a forward thinking art student make Rixome look more plausible than the others.

Related: previously at MaisonBisson: Geolocating The News, When You Don’t Have A GPS, and anything else about geolocation. Interesting websites: Urban Tapestries | Social Tapestries and Gelo.tv. Books: The Wisdom of Crowds and Smart Mobs.

art student, folksonomy, forward thinking, geography, geolocation, geotag, geotagging, laptop screen, mobile, mobile phone, new media, pda, public dimensions, social environments, spoken message, tag, tagged environments, tagging, tags, urban environments