Alex Barnett blog : Tagging

The Third Order of Order

alexbarnett — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:45:00 GMT

I'm thoroughly enjoying David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous (The Power of the New Digital Disorder).

Weinberger has a canny knack for taking a subject matter I feel I'm already familiar with and yet illuminating and expressing facets of it in such a way as to greatly further and deepen my understanding of it. I'm storing the following quote from the chapters "Lumps and Splits" as I'm sure I'll want to reference it again - a great description of how knowledge and information is being transformed in its organization and interface:

"In the third order of order, a leaf can hang on many branches, it can hang on different branches for different people, and it can change branches for the same person if she decides to look at the subject differently. It's not that our knowledge of the world is taking some shape other than a tree or becoming some impossible-to-envision four-dimensional tree. In the third order of order, knowledge doesn't have a shape. There are just too many useful, powerful, and beautiful ways to make sense of our world."

If you haven't already done so, I recommend reading Weinberger's two other books, Small Pieces Loosely Joined and (co-authored) The Cluetrain Manifesto. And that reminds me, I need to update my LibraryThing.

E-Learning 2.0

alexbarnett — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 06:10:00 GMT

What happens to education, learning processes and knowledge sharing when you combine learning objects, MUDs, RSS, podcasting, tagging, social networking, social media, network effects, AJAX, REST, web APIs, interoperable ID systems and open courseware? Answer: a lot...In this video recording of a presentation given by Stephen Downes at the International Conference on Open Courseware and eLearning in Taipei, Taiwan, June 13, 2007, Downes shares his vision of the resulting phenomenon - E-Learning 2.0. Slides are here.

New concepts explicitly introduced to me in this video include: learning networks and learning mashups. If you're familar with "Web 2.0" concepts you can skip to half way through the video to get into relevance of these to E-Learning.

(thanks to Thomas Vaner Wal for the link to Downes' homepage)

MSDN Library - now with Folksonomies

alexbarnett — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 14:46:00 GMT

Larry Jordan has posted news that the MSDN Library now supports tagging by users:

"The MTPS [MSDN and TechNet Publishing System] Tagging feature enables customers and authors to add and remove visible keyword tags to both topic pages and wiki blocks to improve discoverability of the library content. The ability to add tags to content will be enabled for teams who have opted into the Community Content (wiki annotations) feature in MTPS."

You don't need a LiveID account to browse / find tagged content, but you will need one to associate tags to content (or create new tags).

Given it this new feature has just launched, so the tagcloud is small at the moment (the tagcloud been some seeding):

The C# tag results:

I can't ask Larry via his blog (his comments are closed), but two questions for him:

How do the tags in the MSDN Library relate to Tagspace (Microsoft.com's tagging project)
Is there programmatic access to the tag data? (beyond "/Tags-Cloud.aspx?tag="x'"...is a RESTful API in the works? If not, will you provide this, and if so, when?

Thinking with a hyperlinked-content processor

alexbarnett — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 15:35:00 GMT

Alex Pang's post Thinking with a word processor led me to ask myself...

This question: How does my trawling / tagging / blogging / processing of hyperlinked content affect my thinking?

Answer: Immeasurably, I suspect.

The Lightnet Revisited

alexbarnett — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 04:35:00 GMT

At the end of 2005 I wrote a post messing around with some ideas on the future of the net.

One of the ideas was the counter concept to the Darknet, using the term 'Lightnet'. I didn't define 'Lightnet', Lucas Gonze did that (and soon after Lucas was good enough to acknowledge me with credit for the invention of the term in the Darknet context).

Over the next few days, Mike Linksvayer, Peter Van Dijck, Kenyatta, Richard MacManus and Jon Udell did their bit of meme-spreading, then J.D. Lasica, author of 'Darknet: Hollywoods War Against the Digitial Generation', picked up on the Lightnet too, where this pic turned up:

A few days later, Lucas and J.D. Lasica were both interviewed by Jason Boog for an article Jason published at Publish, where Clay Shirky was also asked to comment.

But it didn't end there. Prompted by Raymond's post today I was curious to see how the lightnet meme has been doing so I did some searching around.. Here are some samples of the Lightnet citations I found:

December 2005 - Lightnet becomes a del.icio.us tag
December 2005: J. LeRoy connects the Lightnet with Web 2.0
February 2006 - the above lightnet pic and lightnet concept is discussed by Joshua Kinsberg in the context of political free speech
February 2006 - Dave Tool contemplates 'lightnet services'
February 2006 - Chris Ritke confrims Lucas is adament: "one lightnet but many darknets"
March 2006 - Lightnet is discussed at South by Southwest (whether 'lightnet values' can work in a secure private network)
August 2006 - Soundblog considers Lightnet in a future of open media and social networks
October 2006 - the lightnet is the P2P place
December 2006 - lightnet mused in italian
January 2007 - the term Lightnet get its very own entry in Wikipedia (a bit light on content at the moment - I haven't and won't ;-)
February 2007 - Darknet! = Lightnet
February 2007 - DTLQ believes in lightnets. Raymond wrote that today, 15 months after lightnet's birth.

Long live the Lightnet.

Tagging behind the firewall - a case study

alexbarnett — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 17:32:00 GMT

I've written about 'Enterprise Tagging' or 'tagging behind the firewall' before, but haven't come across any case study material in this area, until yesterday that is. In his latest post, Andrew McAfee has written up a short report on the intranet used at interactive agency Avenue A | Razorfish (AARF):

"What I found most interesting about the company was its own Intranet. To hear David, Ray, and Amy tell it, the company's traditional static Intranet -- the place where an employee would go to look up benefits information or peruse the latest press releases -- still exists, but has been marginalized by a suite of Enterprise 2.0 tools."

What content shows up?

"AARF has built interfaces to the bookmarking site del.icio.us, the photo sharing site Flickr, and Digg, a site where members vote on the importance of news stories. All three use tags, or something close.
AARF employees have learned to add the tag 'AARF' when they come across a web page (using del.icio.us), a photo (Flickr), or a news story (Digg) that they think will be of interest to their colleagues. Shortly after they add this tag, the bookmark (look at the top of the box), thumbnail of the photo (middle) or headline and description of the story (bottom) show up within the AARF E2.0 Intranet. So AARF has found a fast and low-overhead way to let its employees share Internet content with each other. It's also free; these interfaces with del.icio.us, Flickr, and Digg require no fees and no permissions. I find this simply brilliant."

Corporate Attention Data Needs to be Secure

A potential issue to point out here. Since employees are using the AARF tag to share content with other employees and they are doing so on public sites such as del.icio.us, I can also see what AARF employees are bookmarking and sharing with other AARF employees. Is that a good thing? We'll, it's good for me :-). But is that good for AARF? Look, here is a sample. From a cursory look at the AARF tagged bookmarks, I can tell:

Someone is probably lobbying HR for Starbucks coffee machines at the office (I can't blame them...)
Someone is studying Second Life's audience size, probably as an opportunity to either establish their own presence for the agency, or collating info so they can advise clients
Someone is trying to figure out the ROI on blogging (rather you than me...)
Someone is interested in mobile social software apps

Are they giving away company secrets? Lobbying for Starbucks coffee machines, er, probably not. Corporate Second Life plans for AARF? Maybe...

Whoever is responsible for this approach at AARF has probably considered the risks of making this kind of corporate attentional data potentially public (I hope). This level of corporate transparency might be a deliberate decision, but then again, it might not. Either way, companies need to be aware that if they are going to use public tools as a way of sharing content and data in this way, there is the potential to have their corporate attention data tapped into. Today, there is nothing to stop non-AARF employees and competitors subscribing to AARF tag feed and thereby tapping into a thread of AARF's collective thought processes.

(btw, before you point this out, I do realise there is a 'don't share' checkbox in del.icio.us, so it might be the case that what I can see on the AARF tagged content in del.icio.us might only be a subset of content that AARF employees have tagged, and what I'm seeing is what they and feel is OK for the likes of me to see. Even if this is the case and I were the person in change, I'd still be nervous - someone forgets to check a box and well, you get the picture.)

This IP / corporate privacy issue is the precisely the reason why I felt sometime ago that new commercial offerings would emerge to enable corporate tagging be done securely and behind the firewall. That's the 'firewall' bit of 'tagging behind the firewall' idea. (and that's why last year's Mind Camp session was called Del.icio.us Inside). This secure dimension would also allow to internal resources (URIs) to be bookmarked securely...Would you really want competitors to know that you've got a whitepaper written up on the next big thing for your company, with a url: "blah/why_we_will_invest_Xmillion_in_Y_in_2007.html?

Putting this implementation and security issue aside, I believe there is huge potential upside for using social bookmarking and tagging tools inside the firewall, if done right (and that means securely, amongst other things). The pioneering approach by AARF is giving us a glimpse into the future of intranets. I'll give McAfee the final word:

"It gives them 'the latest' about their work environment. And it does so in a bottom-up and egalitarian fashion. This page doesn't contain the latest information that the company's senior managers, or its IT staffers, think employees should know about; it contains the latest information that employees think employees should know about."

P.S. I'm going to bookmark this post 'AARF' on del.icio.us. This should guarantee that it'll appear on the AARF intranet ;-)

P.P.S. If you are at all interested in 'Enteprise 2.0', you really should subscribe to Andrew McAfee's blog. He's associate professor at Harvard who regularly posts on the topic of social software behind the firewall.

A new kind of Tagcloud

alexbarnett — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 02:31:00 GMT

~~Dire O'Banjo~~ Dare Obasanjo::

"It seems some people have decided to invent a third kind of tag cloud; one where the size of the font is chosen at random and has no relation to the popularity or number of items with that tag."

I did a check to make sure I wasn't one of the nameless not mentioned and, to my relief, I can confirm I am not an innovator in this regard.

Enterprise 2.0 and Culture Change

alexbarnett — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 02:27:00 GMT

Andrew McAfee, an associate professor at the Harvard Business School has identified a user segment within organizations that he describes as the 'Empty Quarter'. The context is within the types of users who become the early adopters of Enterprise 2.0' applications (or social media behind-the-firewall). In McAafee's experience, there are two types of early adopters of these types of technologies: Newbies and Techies:

"'Newbies' here means new entrants to the workforce; as I wrote earlier, recent graduates find it natural to socialize, collaborate, and find what they're looking for via technology platforms (think of MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Wikipedia, LastFM, del.icio.us, etc.). In addition to point, click, drag, and drop, their baseline computer skills include search, link, tag, and post.
'Techies' are IT staffers, and also those people scattered throughout the rest of the company who are the natural early adopters and advanced users of whatever technologies are available.
...If these observations are accurate, then a graph with technophobia on one axis and years since graduation on the other reveals who's more and less likely to use Enterprise 2.0 tools if they're made available:

The 'empty quarter' of non-adopters is the upper right-hand section of this graph. These are the folk who are relatively unlikely to pick up new tools and run with them."

McAfee goes on to argue that encouraging the Empty Quarter to participate in the production of social media within the Enterprise will benefit the company as a whole, since a great deal of the knowledge produced by this segment is where the institutional knowledge and corporate memory really resides. He goes on to propose ideas around how these users can be encouraged, including focus on the development of the tools themselves (e.g. make it more useable) and policies that might be introduced:

"Maintain a blog for your group / department. Identify who's in charge of it, and update it at least once a week.
Maintain a blog for each project your lab is working on. Post whatever non-confidential information you'd like your colleagues to know about each one.
Keep your personal page up to date. Make sure it lists your areas and industries of expertise.
Use the wiki to make sure your portion of the org chart is up to date."

I agree with McAfee that in order to get the Empty Quarter to adopt the use of social applications it will require both the combination of good technology and efforts around cultural change. Since he's asking for others to share their experience around what has (and presumably hasn't) worked, here are my thoughts and observations on the topic:

the Del.icio.us Lesson

This one is more to do with the technology design, rather than efforts to socially engineer adoption. The idea is called The Del.icio.us Lesson - a key social software design principle. To summarize Joshua Porter's post (who originally coined the term):

"The one major idea behind the Del.icio.us Lesson is that personal value precedes network value. What this means is that if we are to build networks of value, then each person on the network needs to find value for themselves before they can contribute value to the network. In the case of Del.icio.us, people find value saving their personal bookmarks first and foremost. All other usage is secondary."

Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers

Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo made the observation that social software sites don’t require 100% active participation to generate great value. He used a data point relating to Wikipedia to illustrate the point: half of all edits are made by just 2.5% of all users. Horowitz formalized this idea with the following chart::

"As Yahoo! has been gobbling up many social media sites over the past year (Flickr, upcoming, del.icio.us) I often get asked about how (or whether) we believe these communities will scale.
The question led me to draw the following pyramid on a nearby whiteboard:

The levels in the pyramid represent phases of value creation. As an example take Yahoo! Groups.
1% of the user population might start a group (or a thread within a group)
10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress
100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups (lurkers)
There are a couple of interesting points worth noting. The first is that we don’t need to convert 100% of the audience into “active” participants to have a thriving product that benefits tens of millions of users. In fact, there are many reasons why you wouldn’t want to do this. The hurdles that users cross as they transition from lurkers to synthesizers to creators are also filters that can eliminate noise from signal. Another point is that the levels of the pyramid are containing - the creators are also consumers."

Of course, 'value creation' for a media company such as Yahoo means content that attracts eyeballs, that begets participation, that begets content, that begets further eyeballs and so on. However, I think it would be unwise to then dismiss the general 'natural law' observation around how social media is created, synthesized and consumed as irrelevant in the Enterprise 2.0 context (especially since the observation is provided by someone with a great deal of experimental experience on large scales).

In the context of behind the firewall social media, maybe the key to getting more users to participate is to accept that you can't get everyone to become a content creator. The implication being that one should therefore design efforts to encourage the Empty Quarter with this in mind, and recognize that the role of Synthesizing is just as critical a role in the Enterprise 2.0 space as the the role of creation.

David Winer's view - Don't Bother to Change the Culture

Last year Dave Winer attended a session at Seattle Mind Camp 2.0 that I ran with Michael Blay, Geoff Froh on the topic of behind-the-firewall tagging.

"Dave Winer attended and described the session as a 'intense lightning-fast discussion'. However, he came to the early conclusion as part of that discussion that there was no conclusion - that is a waste of time to try and encourage employees to adopt a tagging culture to share knowledge inside corporate firewall. That users either get it or they don't. You can't force them."

At this post, Dave explained the reasoning behind this view:

"I promised I'd explain once and for all why it's hopeless to "try to get the users" to use social bookmarking software unless they're already using it. Here's why: I don't know. But I do know it never works. It's so bad that when I try to solve the problem (I'm a geek, so I fall into this trap myself, can't help it), I hack at making it easy and painless, figuring it's a user interface problem (if you're a geek you're nodding your head right now, right?) but when I make it so easy anyone would have to do it, not only doesn't anyone else do it, I don't even do it myself! Why? As I said, I don't know! Makes no sense to me at all. But there you are.
I do know that Dan Bricklin posed something like a law to explain the phenomenon, as best as a geek possibly can. Software that rewards you for doing something one percent of the time will get used (email, word processing, SimCity) and software that punishes you for doing it only 99 percent of the time will not get used (calendars, PIMs, categorizing stuff, social bookmarks). The genius of del.icio.us is that it falls into the former category, even though it appears at first to fall into the latter.
Never say Bricklin isn't a smart dude, if you remember his rule, you'll avoid hours of interesting discussions about how important it is to do something that is impossible to do."

I agree and I disagree with Winer.

I agree that if the software is useful for the individual using it, they'll use it (back to the Del.icio.us Lesson). What that says to me then, is that if the software is designed right it can succeed - if not, they won't. I got that.

But then he argues that social bookmarking 'punishes you for doing it only 99 percent of the time': i.e. if you don't always use social bookmarking then 'it' loses it's value. Here I disagree, as that has not been my personal experience. The tagging I do comes and goes in terms of how regularly and how disciplined I am in my tagging stuff. Somedays I just don't tag stuff, somedays I do. When I don't tag stuff for a few days, it doesn't mean that the value of those things I have already tagged diminishes. Those artifacts are still there. Of course, sometimes I wish I had tagged things that I didn't, but that doesn't brake the overall system. It just means it could be better.

So I'm not sure if I fully understand Winer's point here. That said, I do agree with his experience that that some people just will never 'get it'. But I don't think that should mean you shouldn't try.

Culture change can and does work if done right - I know, I've done it within Microsoft. An example is that program managers, software developers and testers are now blogging in our team that weren't before I joined the team: they just needed some encouragement, see the benefits of doing so, receive some training and be provided some support. Not all of our team are blogging of course, but enough to make a significant difference in the way we communicate with customers. And the more bloggers there are, the more that decide to blog. It has also affected the way we communicate inside the firewall too - amongst ourselves within our product team but also with other teams inside of Microsoft. More to do, but the demand for internal blogs and wikis is there. The early adopters will naturally run with these tools but others will require a little more cajoling to see the benefits.

This week, while at DevConnections I attended a session on migrating from Sharepoint 2003 to Sharepoint 2007. Halfway through, the presenter (Bill English) stopped and made the point that all the technical advice he was providing was worth nothing if there wasn't also a culture change effort too: just because the software is there doesn't mean that it'll be used. Effort is required to create awareness of the benefits, training, etc...without these things, you won't succeed.

I'd write more on this but I have to go now. In the meantime, do share your thoughts on this.

Support tagging

alexbarnett — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 23:34:00 GMT

Christopher Carfi threw out a interesting idea yesterday...

"When an organization puts out a product, the organization defines and publishes a particular tag that they will listen for in the blogosphere when there are customer questions (for example, "office2007question" would have been a good tag the MS could promote with its Office 2007 product)
If a customer has a question with a product, he posts the issue (just like Shel has done) with the tag(s) of the associated product(s)
The vendor organization, which is theoretically listening for posts tagged with its "support tags" takes notice, and addresses the issue on the customer's turf."

The post Christopher refers to by Shel is here. It's classic blogger behaviour: I have a problem and hopefully one of my readers can help me out.

I do this from time to time myself and it works. Many do this.

Adding a support tag as a call for help mechanism reminds me of the Structured Blogging concept and edgeio. Earlier this year, I commented on the edgeio's distributed publishing and aggregation model for classifieds:

"Edgeio is a good example of how this aspect of information distribution can become more efficient and convenient for the selling party, and how the data can remain the seller's data. As a seller, all you need to do in order that edgeio lists your product on its site is to post your listing content on a blog, or a site that outputs an RSS feed and include tags for that item. If other marketplaces also decide to go down this route, the seller's item can be also listed by these marketplaces using exactly the same means. So for the seller, they can publish once, run anywhere and maintain control of their data. In this context, edgeio is acting as an infomediary leveraging the distributed power of RSS and giving control back to the user. In this scenario, the act of the seller creating an feed RSS with an item to sell won't achieve a great deal unless something picks up the listing, and does something with it, like distribute it to potential buyers. So edgeio is acting as an infomediary."

Naturally, there will be those who scoff and respond to the support tagging idea along the lines of "Why? Customers should come to our support site, and open a ticket there". And that's how it's done today - make your customers come to you.

But why not reverse this completely? In one sense, this already happens today: customer conscious companies are trawling the RSS search engines and blogs looking for customer feedback / gripes / issues and post comments on those blogs (or post a blog and pingback). This is how these companies win the hearts, minds and loyalty of their customer. Its amazing customer service - a true differentiator.

By providing a support tag, it could allow for further structuring around this 'listening to the blogs customer support' approach. A kind of tagged post RSS aggregator feed could be plugged into existing customer support systems - so instead of email or forum post, it's just a blog. Of course, not all your customers would use it, but if there is a real benefit to the customer in doing so (i.e. faster response times, quality of response, etc), then why wouldn't they? And the benefits to the company providing support in this way? Well, happy customers for one - but if the support is provided via a comment then this provides evidence to prospective customers of the quality of service who happen to come across the blog post.

The more I think about this (and I admit, I've not about it much), the more it makes sense - great idea Christopher.

I'll do my bit and the send idea around within Microsoft for consideration by the powers that be.

Del.icio.us plugin and Live Writer

alexbarnett — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 05:38:00 GMT

This post is using Scott's Del.icio.us plugin and Live Writer.

Amazon and Delicious Plugins (for LiveWriter)
I'm going to have to play around with the Del.icio.us plugin...

It works...picked up my annotation too...!

**Thinking out loud now**...

Too easy!!

So easy in fact that I think this could be a better way of sharing my bookmarks with you. You know, all those 'Links for 2006-10-05 [del.icio.us]' RSS items are ugly and dull and have no commenting ability nor permalink status on my blog nor trackback. Currently you get these via my Feedburner feed (if you're subscribed) by my splicing in the RSS feed of my bookmarks...The plugin allows me to move away from approach now (if it makes sense for me to do so).

An interesting aspect of the way the del.icio.us plugin works is that it asks you to select from all the tags you've used and then checkbox the link(s) you want to include in the post, which then appear(s) in the body of the post ready to edit. I might create a new tag I'll use on Del.icio.us for this purpose, something like 'alex_to_blog', so I can select from those items to blog.

Another nice thing about this plugin approach is that I can expand on the annotation. Today, the Del.icio.us comment / annotation field has a max char length (shorter than I think is necessary from users pov) and the annotations don't allow markup.. This way, I can to 'via' links, etc....it's just blog post now.

Anyway, initial experiment successful, let's see where this goes.

Now for the tagging (no plugin required for <microformatted> tagging with 3rd party services comes with the new beta update of Live Writer):

Technorati tags: del.icio.us, WindowsLive, tagging

A social Microsoft.com

admin — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 05:18:00 GMT

There is a team at Microsoft that over the years has delivered some amazing things for the community of Microsoft customers: blogs on MSDN and TechNet, MSDN Wikis, Codeplex, the Microsoft.com RSS Directory, ASP.NET, and GotDotNet to name a few.

More recently people like Dave Morehouse, Korby Parnell, Bob Rebholz, Jana Carter, Doug Seven and Sandy Khaund have been thinking a great deal around some of the trends emerging around social software, and what these approaches can bring to both Microsoft's online presence and its customers.

One of the fun things about this phase of their design process is how they are 'thinking out loud' with some of their plans and actively looking for feedback as they go. Here are a few links as tasters:

Dave's Spinning the Wheels post explores how tags and tagging, OPML collections and collaborative filtering can be leveraged across Microsoft.com
Korby touches on serendipity as a social phenomenon, manifested through software
Sandy considers the potential inherent in the networking of various community 'silos' that exist across the Microsoft.com, its affiliated sites and those run by customers to create a whole much more valuable whole than the sum of its parts.

If you are into 'social aoftware', keep an eye on this team...

The Long Tail of Tags

admin — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 22:10:00 GMT

I made an observation the other day, that then led me to another and then another. Perhaps these are entirely obvious to you but I hadn't previously made the connection between the tags I use, their frequency in my tagcloud and Chris Anderson's 'the Long Tail' theory. Doing a quick search on the web, I haven't found anything specific to this topic, so I thought I share what I found.

First, let's start with the classic tagcloud. Here's a pic of all the tags I've used at del.icio.us:

As per the standard tagcloud visual representation, the size of each tag represents the relative frequency of the tags I've used - the larger the size of the tag, the more I have used that tag relative to another tag in my 'tagcloud'. Sized tagclouds can be a helpful navigational device, providing a view into the distribution of 'interest' about things. So if you look at my tagcloud, you can get a feel of what interests me.

What I had a hunch about, and confirmed via the graphing, is that my interests seem to follow the classic Long Tail / powercurve.

My Long Tail of Tags

On to the data...

I have tagged 681 'articles' (URLs)
I have used 386 tags
The most used used tag is 'RSS'.
- I've tagged 139 'articles' with the 'RSS' tag, around 36%.
I've used Atom tag 4 times, or 1% (btw, I expect to tag more stuff with Atom as my interest in that topic is on the increase)
I have tagged 25 articles with the tag 'microformats'

So, I threw in my del.icio.us tag data into a spreadsheet - all the tags I have used and their frequency (shown in the tagcloud above) - and then sorted the list by descending order (most used tags as the top), charted and added a logarithmic trendline. This is what I saw:

Each tag is listed along the horizontal axis and their frequency is represented along the vertical, so the tags most used are on the left ('RSS' tag starts the series).

Lo and behold, athe Long Tail appears once more!

This is more than a variation on the theme of the Long Tails of language (Zipf's observation that the frequency of words used in the English language followed a powerlaw distribution) and words - this is the Long Tail of my interests as represented by tags.

I tag stuff of interest to me > my tags express my interests > the distribution of my tags express the distribution of my interests > My mind is a powerlaw!

And if you tag a lot, yours probably is too...try it.

Laws of the Long Tail of Tags

So based on the above, I propose the first two Laws of the Long Tail of Tags:

1. the frequency of a tags used by any user who is not required to follow a formalized taxonomy will follow a Long Tail powercurve disribution
and therefore
2. any tag tagged by a user has an >80% chance of being in that user's 'head' of their tagcloud Long Tail

Kind of obvious if you think about it, I suppose. But it hadn't occurred to me until I thought about tags in Long Tail terms.

Now for another Long Tail in tagspace...

Let's take the Long Tail article published in Wired. Around 1,500 users have bookmarked the article in del.icio.us using all sorts of tags. I looked for the number of tags used by all the users who tagged the article and see of there was a powerlaw there too.

Unfortunately I haven't found a way to find all the tags used by all users for the article - I can only get the top 25 (the limit defined by del.icio.us...if anyone knows how to get the rest of the tags please let me know):

I graphed the above data and included some hypothetical data:

If there is a Long Tail here too, and I'm sure there is, what would that mean? And how do an item's tag distribution relate to behavior of their own tagclouds?

We know already know in that the process of lots of people tagging stuff a collective agreement emerges about how things should be tagged. The popular tags used to categorize an article live at the 'head of the tail'. We can also assume the tags that appear in 'tail' of the Long Tail itself show how an article means different things to different people. But what of their relevance in terms of 'importance' to those taggers?

Looking through the data relating to the entire bookmaking history of the Wired article by all users on del.icio.us, there are tags at the 'tail' that are not listed in the top 25 tags. Examples are

'collaboration'
'strategy'
'amazon'
'retail'

I chose to follow the link of one of the users who tagged the article with the 'collaboration' tag and went to their tagspace on del.icio.us. And there it was...The 'Collaboration' tag was the most used tag by the user called David Kato, almost the only one who tagged the article with the 'collaboration' tag. So I threw David's tagcloud into my spreadsheet...

Below is David's Long Tail of Tags. I'll point out here that he has tagged 168 items, using 72 tags - so it's not a large data set and therefore not seeing a very smoothed out curve here. However, I propose that over time his tag distribution will look more like the classic Long Tail shape we're looking for:

Recommendation Networks

So what does that mean? Again, this maybe quite obvious to you, but this seems pretty interesting. What it says to me at least is that these Long Tails of individual minds are strongly and potentially algorithmically correlated to the Long Tails of taggers' collective efforts.

Looking at the tagging data in this way (and without any use of fancy algorithms) we can see the inherent potential of using tagging as a basis for collaborative filtering and recommendation systems. Based on the the simple and unscientific analysis I've done here, it appears that the world of tagging holds related Long Tail networks everywhere.

In other words, tagware = natural Recommendation Networks

Other Tag related posts of mine (on my old blog):

Moving my blog

Alex Barnett blog — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 15:38:00 GMT

OK, so I moved my new Alex Barnett blog to here for a number of reasons, explained here at my, er, new blog ....(read more)