How many more will there be?

This is the promise and the risk of folksonomies. Folksonomies arise when people are tagging objects (Web pages, photos, etc.) in public. If you want something to be found by others, you'll choose the most popular tag. That adds yet more momentum to that tag. And before you know it, most people tag posts about PC Forum as "pcforum05," not "pcf", "pcf05" or "Esther's thang." Folksonomies are bottom-up controlled vocabularies.

A common assumption in this discussions is that the aim of tagging is the action of many to try and organize the un-organizable (web content). I see many more variations, and the success of flickr points to the important of tags but perhaps smaller groups of people aiming to tag a more discrete set of content. So what if my choice of a tag doe snot match up to what 96% of the tagging population uses-- if it is important to me, or useful to a group I work with, then things are good. When I tag my photos with "flowers" it is to help me find pictures of my own desert flower photos, and I may use that to send a slide show or to syndicate the images to some other page... here I am not tagging to organize the rest of the net, just my tiny corner.

For another project, my own simple 3 tag structure allows my to use flickr to populate different areas of a web site.

My wayward point is when we tag, we are not necessarily trying to chart the entire internet, just stuff that is relevant.

And Weinberger gets to it in his following post on 2x2 folksonomies by trying to put the tagging services in a 2 day axis of public vs private tags on one axis, and tagging "my stuff" vs "everyone's stuff" on another, and that helps clarify that there is not just simple, all inclusive "tagging".

And the field is getting crowded. There is a new del.icio.us look alike, del.irio.us (and are we soon to see de.siro.us, de.mentio.us, de.liveran.ce (plays banjo music while you tag, "Tag like a pig!"?? ) and an open source Scuttle... who, of any of these, will rise to be the Google of social bookmark sites?

The suite of tools (MovableType for blogs, UseMod for wiki, and phpBB for the boards, plus an events database) were all threaded by RSS, meaning 4 groups with 4 channels each of feeds connected to one central "dashboard" view of our efforts.

Things have moved along since our launch September 2004, and much overdue is an update of how this is going. Before revealing the grades, a few general observations:

* The more familiar tools were more readliy accepted
* It takes some compulsive personalities to be at this regularly
* In a larger organization, time is needed to diffuse the approach through the system
* Spam attacks are a major dis-incentive to using the tools
* More time, patience, and perseverance is helpful for those behind the scenes.

Weblogs C+
Most of our blogging faculty were not as ... ahem... regular as I would have hoped. A number of them fell into the rut of "I'll blog it later" mode. More than once I emphasized the importance of "blogging in the moment" when the emotions and reflections of an activity are the brightest. One of them did get into a regular routine of blogging once a week, which is reasonable. We asked that they blog every time they engage in any work (research, development, meetings) that were related to the group activity.

A good majority did not understand how to edit with workable hyperlinks, so some just have text URLs or none at all. We did purchase a copy of ecto for those that were interested in a desktop blog editing tool (sadly the Windows version was harder to set up and use).

A spate of comment spam early on turned some off as well. No surprise, to be composing what is meant to be useful information, and to get an email notification that some casino pushing pill pooping porn star had something irrelevant to say. For a few months we just shut it off until we could step up the spam walls.

All of our folks understood the value and importance of creating this record of their work, and there has been marked improvement over the last two month. Will Richardson's writings were a positive influence for a number of our folks, and one of them got bitten nicely by the RSS bug.

This is a helpful reminder that a majority of people do not have the compulsive nature to be regular bloggers and may need more motivation to blog than just the simple act of publishing. Sure, you can make it a graded requirement with students... Comment spam definitely works in the wrong direction.

Discussion Boards B+
Web discussion boards are the most comfortable of the technologies since most people have experience with them in their Course Management Tools or elsewhere. Our boards had some highwater successes, especially after a slower than hoped online kickoff in September.

The online activity for the Hybrid Courses group in mid November as a follow-up to a face to face event... and no one showed up. This was chalked up to a lack of early advertising and some missing clarity on the activity structure.

We have had two in particular that were encouraging- The late November eportfolio discussions with David Tosh and Ben Werdmuller (from elgg.net) had more than 50 posts and since then has racked up more than 1100 pageviews. What worked here was some stepped up local nagging and promoting. This one gave us hope.

And even better was an early March discussion board activity Wide World of Hybrid Teaching and Learning Online Activity with Virtual Guests from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where we logged more than 240 posted messages and well over 1000 views. What worked well here was some very clear structure, we had obtained professional growth credit, and much goes to the level of participation and preparation by the folks at UM-W.

For our faculty to earn their professional growth credit, they were required to log in before they started in a session, and once again when they were leaving, as to get a timestamp for the amount fo time spent within (more...).

We have at least two more of these set up for later this Spring (for learning objects).

Spam was an issue here but more of a nuisance that most participants never saw. We set up the phpBB boards so participants had to request an account (requiring admin approval). We were stumped for a while on a slate of requests for email addresses in Russia, and links having to do with bracelet sales, casino stuff, etc. The accounts were never created, but I can only guess this was aimed at inserting a link as phpBB creates a profile for each registered account.

This was all solved by an update to phpBB that inserts a captcha (a graphic random set of letters and numbers) on the account request page. My hunch is that the cruft we saw early was scripted insertion.

Wikis D
There was no measurable activity on our Ocotillo wikis. Just about all of them were turned off by the appearance of massive amounts of beastiality and other variant links in the wikis, all before they could even begin to dabbled. My solution was to close down the open wikis (a password is required for editing), but no one hbas waded more than toe deep in the wiki waters.

To promote some awareness, I have used the wikis for some different content uses, mostly workshops/presentations:

* Rip. Mix. Learn... The Digital Generation, Social Technologies, and Learning a presentation for the Training Expo - Partners Conference
September 23, 2004

* Finding (and Using!) Good Free Stuff a workshop for an ASU course on "Social and Ethical Issues in Educational Media" (September 2004)

* Maricopa’s Ocotillo Evolves Again: 18 Years of Faculty Led Instructional Technology Initiatives presented March 2005 for the League Innovations conference.

* Agenda planning for the Feb 2005 Dialogue Day with Helen Barrett had a small level of editing by faculty co-chairs and our speaker.

Overall I would put us at the C+ / B- grade range, again with some hopeful signs of recent improvement. I am not prepared to give any of the tools up, though I may look at other technology platforms for next year.

Create a wist account, load a browser bar tool, and when you are surfing and want to track a site in your "collection" (a del.icio.us task), wist offers to create an icon based on any image it can find in the page (quasi flickr-like). Slap on some tags, and see where your tags lead you. There is a friend of a friend thing there too, but I lack friends (apparently).

You end up with a collection of tagged icons representing sites you have "wisted".

Since it syndicates, this is another one in the pack of Rip. Mix. Feed.

I am wisting but I have no idea what I am doing.

In a nutshell, it looks like a filckr for video, and it semms there are a lot of other folks moving "theirmedia" in this direction.

What caught my attentions was that vimeo is taking tags applied to video clips, and assembling them dynamically into QuickTime flicks, such as the concert movies vimeo show.

Ironically I had suggested something like this in the early pow-wows last summer when we met as the advisory board for the 2005 New Media Consortium Horizon project. My idea was not exactly what vimeo shows in tis beta, but I thought of something like a wiki for video content- where one could collaboratively mix and match and edit video content, much like a wiki (There was a photo wiki out there, lost rack of it...). No one backed my idea, including me.

Anyhow, it's late in the day, but I am piqued by vimeo....

I like it so much, I wanted to run it on my PC laptop across the desk from me.

What I did not like was when I logged in with the account I use on my Mac, I notice that my contacts do not appear, so it seems that they are not stored centrally (like AIM, ICQ), but on my computer. This means that should I get a new computer, want to run this elsewhere, my contacts do not go with me. They need to be re-entered, re-authorized?? Tell me it isn't so?

Maybe I am missing the forest for a bamboo stick in front of my face, or I missed an obvious button menu item. It would hardly be the first time.

Nope, it's a FAQ, Jack, in Using Skype:

You can log in to Skype from multiple computers, but you won’t have access to your contacts since this is stored locally (on the computer where you first installed Skype). You will have to add and authorize your friends once again. We will be implementing a feature that will allow you to get access to your friends list automatically from multiple computers.

C'mon- a simple import/export feature (X-platform, just shuffle some XML) cannot be that difficult to add.

That said, I still like Skype.

Update: I found a way. From my Mac Skype I selected Send Contacts... form the Contacts menu and was able to send them to my Skype Account- they arrive on my PC and I was able to load them as contacts. What is not clear is if I need to bother my friends again with authorizing a contact request (I bypassed the screen via Cance).

Thjis is now posted on a new site FLOSSE (Free/Libre and Open Source SoftwarE) which is a "posse"

FLOSSE Posse is a group blog consisting of members of Free and Open Source Software Association (VOPE) from Finland. We will carry out reportage of FLOSS and Open Content in Education.

The interview is now available at:
http://flosse.dicole.org/?item=future-of-floss-in-education-interview-with-alan-levine

or the direct audio:
http://flosse.dicole.org/media/podcasts/Flosse_posse-Alan_Levine_20050124.mp3

Considered the list of heavy hitters to come in the next interviews, I am humbled and honored to be the first one posted. Go ahead, Leon, take your best potshots.

The open source / free tools themselves used, Skype, Blogs, et al, are themselves a testament to the topics discussed, another cheering round of Small Technologies Nicely Joined. I'm ready to... well think about doing some SKyperviews in the near future.

John the Blog (a.k.a David Weinberger), fac.etio.us is a product of Sideran Software ("navigation for the digital universe"), a maker of corporate tools that offer:

...intelligent search and retrieval applications lead you easily through oceans of uncharted corporate data to the relevant documents, products, and web pages that you need to find.... Our customers have slashed the time wasted by traditional text-based search methods, dramatically improving the quality and timeliness of their decisions. Seamark integrates gracefully with your existing information infrastructure, providing the results you want, when you want them. Our facet-based navigation explores the content using intuitive categories and keywords that match the way you think about your business. Navigation is so intuitive that new users can achieve superior results without any formal training.

You likely do not see news of fac.etio.us on the Siderean news, but the fact that it is there beside the corporate brohure-ware says that this company is doing some semi public R&D.

But back to what might be cool. Apparently, fac.etio.us is applying some of the keyword associaton logic of "faceted" searching by re-casting the last 5 days worth of del.icio.us feeds. From Joho:

Faceted classification assigns a set of parameters (facets) to the objects it's classifying and then lets users sort them using the facets in any order. For example, appointments in your calendar might have facets for time, date, person, location, subject, and importance. You could then ask to sort first by person, then by location, and then by date, and a minute later walk through them by importance, then date, then subject, etc. In short, faceted classification systems let you construct trees with the roots and branches in whatever order suits you at that moment. And faceted systems never lead you down branches that have no fruit.

So, Siderean is playing around with doing a faceted classification of about five days' worth of bookmarks at del.icio.us. In an email, this is what Bradley Allen, the founder and CTO, says:

Currently this is being updated hourly from three feeds: delicious, delicious/popular, and my own inbox feed. The RSS feeds are being transformed into slightly richer RDF using the Dublin Core and SKOS vocabularies, then loaded into Seamark and made navigable using dc:subject (tag), dc:creator, dc:publisher (site), dc:moderator (feed) and dc:date as the facets. Currently this is being updated hourly from three feeds: delicious, delicious/popular, and my own inbox feed. The RSS feeds are being transformed into slightly richer RDF using the Dublin Core and SKOS vocabularies, then loaded into Seamark and made navigable using dc:subject (tag), dc:creator, dc:publisher (site), dc:moderator (feed) and dc:date as the facets.

So when I peeked, the facetious look offers a flickr-like font-size proportional view of tags, delicious creator, sites mentioned, as well as the 3 feeds mentioned above, and date added:

So in some sense, I have at a top level, 5 different content type paths to begin drilling down to, but within each, I have many more choices (based on the tags, the size of the tag telling me that there are more sites (or it is more popular). This is a rich choice of navigation paths-- so my inner geek follows the PHP link, which presents a new facet of 98 tagged sites, the display based on listings that shows tags people have applied along side the PHP tag, the other 4 facets, and at the very bottom, the first 10 of the 98 (with links to see more):

And from there I find a nice site with tagging to my own set on 11 Cool Things You Can Do with PHP. In 3 clicks, I drilled down through 9700+ sites, to a more specific set of 98 things, down to one I found useful. The numbers of paths through the facets are near infinite, and have me thinking new ways on classification schemes- is these a layer of quasi structure on unstructured tagging?

But what do I know? I am no professional metadata maven. But this dog knows when something smells interesting.

Hi

Your rss2js service is first class. I love the code generator and the service itself - what a great job!

I have a web site 'www.asturex.com' about Asturias in Spain. It has lain pretty dormant for a few years.

I don't have time to produce lots of content for the site, but what I have wanted to do for a while is be able to at least pump news through the site, but without having to re-work the site too much or build myself a backend news database.

Anyway a couple of days ago I saw that Ask Jeeves had bought out Bloglines, and when I took a look it was so easy to set up a blog that I went ahead. Then I thought if only I could get the blog rss into my web site I'd have the news issue sorted. Then I found your site and - hey presto!

Many thanks for a great service.

Great job Ian! Score another one for Rip. Mix. Feed.

Just add a sidebar photo feed from flickr and you are set!

P.S. Kind of interesting that the Jeeves buy is funneling more people into the mix.

Flickr Graph is an application that explores the social relationships inside flickr.com. It makes use of the classic attraction-repulsion algorithm for graphs.

Basically it lets you visualize and generate a dynamic social network the friends and friends of fiends and the friends of friends of friends as defined in flickr. Each node you click on, moves to the center and blossoms with the network for that person. Whichever node is in the center has a link to "view pics" or to load their flickr page

So starting with Will's network I re-organize to put mine in the network....

Now I must admit I've not spent much time going around adding flickr friends (I tend to explore flickr via tags) but now I have more of a reason. It makes for a new interesting way to travel the flickr network-- where can I go with six clicks away from me (traveling by random picks of icons-- note to flick-ers, best to create a flickr icon that is customized- the grey flat smile is pretty ordinary)

(1) cogdogblog (that is me)
(2) mrgluesniffer (brian lamb)
(3) striatic (they guy who did the cool Vancouver flickr map)
(4) eric (no idea)
(5) Jason Classon (no idea)
(6) -- oops ran into an error could not go one more

Lands a flickr map that arranges itself to display my path:

And checking out jason's images... well, he has a mix which liekly explains it self, fun images, beach images, warehouse images... the flickr grpah loads its own representation, and his URL, tags, and individual image icons are all links into flickr:

Every re-draw of the flickr graph seems to generate a slightly different map arrangement. A totally addictive experience. Check it out...

And this is why flickr is the über über über of internet technologies- it is easy to use, engaging, and its APIs allow for innovative add-ons like this example. It would be the opposite of the standard corporate approach to try and keep users penned in. If your internet strategy is aimed at making your site "sticky" to users (locking them into your site), remember that as individual humans, being stuck to something is not very attractive. We want freedom, the ability to come and go, to choose paths, to create our own ways of using content, to rip, mix. Flickr has got it nailed.

Check it out, your mileage may vary given my tendency for programming typos:
http://cogdogblog.com/alan/marklet_maker.php

New! Cell Phone (wap) URL: www.srh.noaa.gov/wml

Now I have a stone age cell phone with no hope of being WAP capable (Wireless Application Protocol) but vaguely recollect how the limited display capabilities require web content in WML form (Wireless Markup Language). Well, see more on the WAP/WML acronym soup from W3Schools.

You can get at info pretty quickly through WAP since it is designed to be just data, structured, and lightweight (the NOAA urls load s-l-o-w on the 28 bps modem speed up here).

So here is what I dug up....

Folksonomies are different in important ways from top-down, hierarchical taxonomies — the shape we've assumed knowledge itself takes.

The old way gets some experts together who create a nested tree of concepts into which everything in a particular domain can be slotted. Think of the Dewey Decimal System. Think of the Tree of Life. The new way invites users of information to add a word or three to the objects they want to find again.

The old way provides the vocabulary we are to use. The new way lets us use our own words.

The old way puts the control of the classification system in that hands of the owners of information classifying it.

The new way gives control to the users of information.

The old way creates a tree. The new rakes leaves together.

This is not an either-or. The old way — trees — make sense in controlled environments where ambiguity is dangerous and where thoroughness counts. Trees make less sense in the uncontrolled, connected world that cherishes ambiguity.

Nicely painted, eh?

But I admit, I have been super sloppy on my del.icio.us tagging, willy nilly and not consistent:

I have "learningobject", "learningobjects", "learning" and "object"! What tag gunk.

So on my "some day to do list" is to rake these leaves into a slightly neater file. Part of it will be helped by the interface of the experimental del.icio.us bookmarklet tool that not only provides the form fields, but also a clikckable lost of all tags you have used (click any to add it for the page in view) as well as ones recommended from the wider audience.

So thanks to a holiday gift card from Borders (which is really just a portal to Amazon) just fresh off the Amazon.com truck comes my own personal copy of David Weinberger's "Small Pieces Loosely Joined.

I am eager to see if it is everything I made it out to be ;-)

In late 1993, one of the programmers at the software company where I was vice president of strategic marketing called me into his office. "You have to see this," he said, pointing to his computer screen, standing as I sat, drumming his fingers anxiously on his thighs. There was an ugly gray document in an ugly window labeled "Mosaic." In the middle of the ugly black text was a phrase, underlined and in bright blue. "It's a link," my fiend said. He clicked on it, and a new document took its place.

Wow, this was a parallel experience I was having almost at the same time!

This is only pave vii, so it is good already.

This has been a donation-ware project, and has gone on and off for more than a year-- the Eye Dog folks are not techies, and getting content has been, well tough at times. My plans for the site was to architect it in a modular fashion with an ultimate goal of having a basic admin system for the staff to be able to update the content via web forms. A number of content areas are loaded with randomly chosen "content-lets" such as the background image sin the footer and the "Friends of the Foundation" blurbs in the sidebar.

Thus, it is a labyrinth of a few PHP templates, and a whole lot of text file includes for content pieces. And it was made to have switchable style sheets form graphic to text only views.

The "pieces" came into play quite nicely for dealing with random and sets of topical photo sets. Originally I was setting a database to manage this, but saw a lot of issues in taking the large variety of images they provide (the old site had 1+ Mb 300 dpi images just resized in HTMML), so I saw possibly having to edit and optimize photos. But it struck me about a month or two ago, that flickr would be ideal because the originals can uploaded as monster sized originals out of their digital cameras, and flickr would resize automagically. And then we could use the flickr syndication site wide. So I began loading images in a basic flickr site.

On many places there is a randomly inserted image, essentially using the basic JavaScript random image syndication that flickr provides from all photos, set to display just one image. So I have a include file, named random_flickr.inc sitting on my site that has in it:

<div class="gfoto">

<script type="text/javascript" 

    src="http://www.flickr.com/badge_code.gne?nsid=93872691@

    N00&count=1&display=random&name=0&size=mid&raw=1"></script>

<p class="caption">

<strong>Random Eye Dog Foundation Photo</strong><br>

see more  photos in the 

<a href="fttp://www.flickr.com/photos/eyedogfoundation/" target="foto">

flickr photo gallery</a>!</p>

</div>

So any page on the site cab have a random file just by inserting a PHP include statement:

   .........
   <?php include '../includes/random_flickr.inc'; ?>

Our general photography page again uses the flickr JavaScript feed to pull 3 images from all we have uploaded.

But because there was also a need to have some subsets of photos, I set up a basic "structure" (my it might even be a controlled vocabulary) for our flickr tags:

• guidedog tag: applied to all photos so we could use the tagged photo slideshow feature to create a link to a self running slide show.
• puppiestag: applied to all photos of puppies, to build a page of photos just for the puppy raisers area. With a tag set, we do not have the JavaScript available from flickr, but there is an RSS feed. So the photos on this page are actually done with the RSS feed from flickr processed through a local version of Feed2JS. This is one of those times when I wish feed makers would go beyond just offering feeds of the most X recent images- I would love a feed of an arbitrary number chosen at random (I could access a feed of say 20, and write my own code to pluck out 2 random from that set...)
• grads tag: from the photos they have of student graduates, for a part of the student area with a photo gallery of program graduates, built just like the set of puppy photos.

Again,. flickr will allow non technical volunteers yo upload images, and they just need a 10 minute demo to understan how to apply the tags. Flickr feeds the site at many levels.

The part of the small pieces approach has been using Blogger as a publishing platform for an online newsletter, the Eye Dog Foundation News Blog. This is set up to use Blogger and have it directly FTP access to our site, providing a wayto publish the content directly to our site. This meant re-casting the Blogger templates into the EDF site design (no quick feat) and getting the sidebar to slide into the defined areas used on other pages. One of the first things was making all the CSS out of the template and setting it up to lint to an external CSS- making the design tweaks much quicker than having to republish 30 times in a row.

I made a master blogger account for the fictitious editor, "Magic the Eye Dog" (actually the name of the first dog they trained). Next on the list is using Bllogger to invite some others in as editors, where they will use the simpler Blogger interface (no access to settings or templates). The plan is to have volunteets do some regular posting as an online newsletter.

Having flickr means also we can blg images from flicr, and publish them through Blogger (see exmaple).

Things to add include an interface for entering event info into a database, to drive an online events calendar.

The Foundation folks seemed pleased so far with the site, and its been a fun, learning lesson for me. The availability of these free web services provide some excellent paths to allow the people who know the content to do more of the publishing than me.