User:Jackson Fox

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Contents

Notes: David Weinberger & Thomas Vander Wal

David Weinberger Speaks

We can't understate the important of Folksonomy.

Folksonomy is not new (ok, they're relatively new), Ebay's auction categorization is a folksonomy even if it isn't tag-based.

Folksonomy sticks it to the man. What right do they (the man) have to tell us HOW to think about things (classification via structured systems).

Folksonomy is another example of the power of emergence, and of the "social".

I think we should all thank MS for the phrase "Welcome to the Social".

See Peter Morville's "Ambient Findability". He was wrong about the idea that too many tags will lead to CHAOS. See Flickr's tag clusters. They work the best when there ARE too many tags.

Damn, missed something about diversity.

Folksonomy reject essentialism. Folksonomy says that there isn't ONE TRUE WAY to use something.

Essentialism == meaning is in the thing itself.

Does Folksonomy demean meaning? Within Folksonomy meaning is ambiguous and amorphous.

Folksonomy is just one dimension within something new, and now that we've broken through that ??... Got distracted...

Thomas Vander Wal Speaks

Tag == simple metadata, used for sorting

Tagging taps into an existing cognitive process (Rashmi) and leverages our internal desire to label things within our head and try to understand them (even if that understanding wrong).

When citing Wikipedia, don't forget to cite the version (date)

Folksonomy is the result of free tagging of pages and objects for one's own retrieval

The tagging is usually done in a social environment

The act of tagging is done by the person consuming the information. /Can't the creator also tag the content? How is this not folksonomy?/

Tagging is derived from the tagger's own vocabulary. Tagging adds explicit meaning, which may come from inferred understanding.

People are not so much categorizing, as providing a means to connect items (placing hooks) and providing THEIR meaning in THEIR own understanding.

Doesn't like Flickr because it doesn't allow "identity".

The folksonomy triad: object, identity, metadata. /I'm not sure I understand the meaning of "identity" in this context/

Folksonomy allows an expansion into community and community information spaces.

/Now, the reason I see Flickr-style creator-based tagging as folksonomy is that it does occur within a social space when those tags are aggregated./

Business & Folksonomy

Tensions:

 Naming control <---> People's vocabulary 
 Sample groups <---> Everybody
 In-house <---> Outside service 
 $$$ w/ value <---> $ w/ unknown value
 Consistent <---> Emergent
 

The business gains an improved understanding of customers, and they gain an up-to-date terminology (vocabulary). See the tags for Kevin Federline's CD on Amazon.

Businesses also gain better market understanding and market segementation.

About 0.5% of people on the web (and going up).

Why do people tag? Because they gain personal value (Josh Porter, the del.icio.us lesson). Tags add perspectives to content (missing metadata, emergent vocabulary, personal descriptors). Tags aid in refindability (aggregation of information, task-based aggregation). Tags are also a statement of interest /this seems to tie this all together/. Also, tags are a form of sociability /this seems to touch on the ideas of social capital and game-like behavior in (social) tagging systems/.

Every person is an expert in their own vocabulary (tags).

RawSugar creates facets based on algorithmic clustering, and uses this information for filtering. Flickr also does clustering, but only for browsing.

Discussion

Gary - Do people tag with non-text things? TVW - Platial lets you attach photos to places via geotagging

Cathy - What about verbs? Are tags a narrative with no verbs? TVW - del.icio.us also searches the narratives the are attached to every object that is tagged

Cathy - Is identity more important than tagging?

Cliff Lampe - The politics of tagging, the use of the tag "gay" on Slashdot posts DW - The concept of interestingness seems to combat this by demoting tags that are too common (are not interesting)

CM - People forget what they have in their collections /Can we remind people what they have in their collections by integrating our tagged collections with other IR systems?/

Jakob - There are lots of different kinds of tagging

Misc Notes

Tagging is one facet of meaning, and there are a lot of intrinsic pieces of information that are also available

Is creator tagging folksonomy? Is it "social tagging"?

What about tagging as a glue function?

IDF is lousy for tagging, because it is focused on retrieval versus definition.

Tools need to better support tag management if they are serious about the use of tagging as a retrieval process or as an archival tool.

What is the long-term view of tagging? Will its efficacy decrease over time?

Can we tag tags? Add categories to tags to create faceted tag clouds.

Understanding use (taxonomy of tags) to build better tools (the problem of interface). The tag cloud!

CONTEXT, CONTEXT, CONTEXT

Terrel thinks we can use expertise to make tags more meaningful. The problem is that expertise is subjective and contextual.

Social Tagging Panel

Alla: Is relevance no socially constructed?

Tags are created knowledge, or at least creates meaning, but the act of tagging itself is also knowledge creation. The action of tagging, that is the cognitive process of labeling, helps create semantic connections that are useful for recall.

Where do the tags people us come from? So they come from the title? Do they come from the body of the content?

Does this evolve over time as people learn tactics for using tagging as a practical method.

Do people adopt new tags as they learn the vocabulary of the discipline?

80/20 -- 20% tagger, 80% moochers?

Tagging within institutions as a method for knowledge management? IBM's Dogear tool.

How do motivations influence he types and uses of tags? And then how do these influence the consumption of tags?

Social Networks Panel #1

Amanda Lenhart (Pew): Focus groups with young people about their conceptions and expectations of privacy.

Information about your physical space, physical location, etc. were considered the most sensitive and important.

A lot of tension between privacy and wanting to be found by the people you want to find you. /It seems that the Facebook "networks" model is one way to handle this, though an imperfect one./

Methodological problem: the language of the space changes to fast and so frequently, that doing *good* research in this space can be very difficult.

Zeynep Tufecki: Regardless of the idea that the internet will make identity creation eay and common, when you look at "digital native" kids they are using these spaces as "actual" representations of themselves. To them its a giant phonebook. While identity creation and experimentation do happen, they happen within the context of a "true" identity.

Kara Dawson: How do you bring cultural studies to this medium? For example, what happens when the population you are studying goes and deletes their profiles? Or deletes the specific information you were tracking?

Andrea Forte: How to students see the invasion of the influx of professors into what they perceive as an exclusive space? SNS is a technology of constraint (as opposed to social tagging wich is all about relinquishing control). Historically CS researchers built tools and then studied the uses and effects of those tools. Today the cool stuff is happening in other peoples systems, where we don't have control over design. We have to take into account the intentions and goals of the people who designed these systems. /I wonder if this is one reason that a lot of research is happening in industry./

What does "friend" mean inside of SNS? /I know Facebook allows you to qualify the meaning of "friend", but do any other systems allow more granularity in creating these connections?/

Is it dissapointing that the majority of our actions on SNS are fundamentally mundane?

Ok, so we just brought up the whole "THEY HAVE MY DATA!" issue. /It's true that they have our data, and that they are commercial entities, but right now what's the alternative? Maybe SNS will become more distributed and open source in the future, but right now Facebook and MySpace DO meet their users needs. Besides, do we really expect EVERY SINGLE PERSON on MySpace to own their own server?/

Not all SNS are alike. If Facebook is a big phone book, is MySpace a big performance space? Similarly, the meaning of "friending" in each context is very different. /We complain that people are forced to have multiple different profiles, but maybe those different profiles have very different uses. When teens don't know what "social network profile" is, maybe that should indicate that they are all different things, different places. And when we say that users are not creating multiple identities, maybe we have to think about this idea./

SNS is a global thang.

The general consensus is that the blogosphere is not a SNS, or at least not a very good one. K THNX BYE.

Barbara Wildemuth: Study? Is the stuff that I put into my profile (movies, music, etc.) REALLY IMPORTANT (Jacob) or nothing special (Susan Gov)? Is it a way of claiming membership in a tribe, or is it meaningless (or at least meaning poor)?

Social Networks Panel #2

Alice Warwick: How does the profit model affect the user experience and interface design? The standard fields in many SNS are consumer-related. Same with the embeddable media. The users social capital is converted in to financial capital for the SNS. Does this motive affect the way that users are interacting on the site? Are the SNS effective at creating activities that improve their financial capital.

Fred: It's hard to talk to kids about why they do stuff. There is a strong enmeshing of the online with the offline, and this enmeshing will only get stronger. Are we now dealing with personal LIFE management instead of personal INFORMATION management?

Fred thinks that there will be a decentralization of SNS. Users have very little say in the SNS. There will be people who want to be in adjacent networks, but still interact with each other.

How do the intentions of the SNS developers shape the sociology of the SNS?

Addy Lee: Worked at Yahoo Personals. The real competition for dating sites is now free SNS. Do people behave the same on SNS and on online dating sites? Well, on SNS people will really ding you when you... exagerate in your profile.

One of the greatest sources of social friction is the ranking and placement of friends on your profile page. Can we make the friends list more meaningful so that we reduce the amount of social friction that is associated with it? How can we re-design this feature.

Terrel: The friends list is a reduction, and any reduction will cause problem due to loss of information.

Fred: We need to be more expressive in the relationship that we have online.

Susan Gov: People have a multiplicity of identities. Those identities come into conflict in systems that only allow us to be one person. As a result, users become very conscious of how they are being presented on these sites and will ommit information that they think may compromise one idenity or another.

Gary: Maybe we shouldn't be so quick to aggregate identities across systems if we have multiple identities.

ME: Well, I think that's working around a limitation in the systems. Rather, we should look at how we can better manage multiple identities, because I DO want to aggregate each of those identities across multiple services. However, each identity might live in different places.

Cliff: Rather than managing what we show, maybe we should be thinking about managing who can see our profiles.

TVW: A lot of people have backrooms. Private LiveJournals, private Vox blogs, private Flickr photos, etc.

Alice: De-friending someone on LJ is like breaking up IRL.

ME: Can we make the relationships more explicit?

EVERYONE: No

TVW: The granular SNS will let me say that Bob and I agree on red wine, hamburgers, jazz and nothing else. /This seems like it would be a good filtering tool for individuals, but not a good public tool./

Cliff: The people on Facebook seem to figure out the qualifications of relationships. They use contextual cues to analyze the relationship.

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