Exploring Folksonomies before midnight October 25, 2006

It’s a race to the finish!  See how far I make it through the readings before midnight!

The Kroski article is a good summary of the Pros and Cons of folksonomies, but the most important message, I feel, is that “resistance is futile”! The web is so large and ever-changing that paying professionals to classify it all is just impossible – folksonomies are “better-than-nothing” so we’d better get used to it and stay on top of this technology.

The Wikipedia article seems to me like a good place to start when convincing a company/organization to take up the practice of tagging. In a special library environment tagging would be very useful since the corporation/organization would consist of specialized professionals who would share similar vocabularies and interests. If you want to classify all of the organization’s documents for database retrieval you could therefore depend on the creators to tag their items (and future readers to fix the tags), towards what this article calls an “emergent enterprise taxonomy”.  The Quintarelli article was an excellent choice for me to read next since it explains the best way to supplement enterprise tagging:  “In the direction of facing the intrinsic precision loss of folksonomies, Jess McMullin proposes to complement social classification with other classification approaches: «automated keyword extraction, tag suggestions built into the tagging tool as the tag is typed [see Google Suggest and Ajax technology], mapping ad-hoc tags to structured facets, and top-down classification oversight by information professionals».”  Great idea!

The Kome study finds that hierarchical relationships exist in folksonomies.  Perhaps I am tired, or perhaps my brain is full, but either way this librarian-speak isn’t getting through to me right now.  Could anyone help me out and let me know what the bottom line is for libraries and folksonomies?  My impression so far is that the fact that hierarchical relationships exist means good things for tagging… I am sure I am missing something deep here.

Oh no!  my phone rang.  I will have to continue this later…

Comparison Shopping October 18, 2006

I really like the looks of my new BlinkList account but I wish I could import my del.icio.us account! I know I should be able to but my passwords don’t seem to work for their export to xml del.icio.us page. I love looking at my colourful cloud, the images of the webpages next to the links, and being a ipod user I love that I can rate the sites with stars. That would be very useful for a library when social bookmarking because the users could let you know how much they appreciate your links.

I tried CiteULike out once before and magically remembered my account password! Miracle! But just looking at it again made me cringe because I remember how much typing I had to do to insert one reference.  I believe it only automatically populates the bibliographic information from one database.

I was watching for Zotero to come out!!! I can’t believe how techie I sound right now, what a fluke. It promised to do a way better job than CiteULike and it has a cooler Web2.0 name…  And check this out: “Zotero may also automatically grab LC subject headings (for books) and keywords for articles” when tagging!  That’s great news for librarians!  Now all I want to know is, how can I import my del.icio.us bookmarks???

SocialSocial

Well, after all this time using del.icio.us we’ve finally made it to social bookmarking! Great! One theme that appears again and again through this week’s readings is Hammond’s concept of ‘selfish’ vs. ‘altruistic’ tagging; Udell’s ‘self-interested personal information management’ vs. a ‘social’ system; and Porter’s ‘personal value’ vs. ‘network value’. What they are all talking about is the dual nature of social bookmarking: first and foremost people who use del.icio.us are saving bookmarks to use at a later date, but they are also (perhaps not intentionally) tagging web pages for other del.icio.us users to find. This commentary has made me aware of the uselessness of some of my tags to anyone who is not me (lis757_required) and the usefulness of others (SocialBookmarking).

For me, these (random) points also stood out from this weeks readings:

• tagging does not use the hierarchical structures of formal classification systems, it is flat (Hammond)
• a disadvantage of tags is that they are often ambiguous becaues people use them in different ways, for example I may tag restaurant reviews ‘food’ while someone else may tag recipes ‘food’ (Mathes)
• Flickr lets you have spaces in tags while del.icio.us doesn’t (Mathes)
• I have the del.icio.us extension for firefox and use it all the time, but I didn’t notice the sidebar feature (Hollenback)

Finally, thanks to these readings I can see how tagging would help patrons better retrieve items from library catalogues (as a supplemental method to teaching them traditional keyword and subject searching) and next I will explore the case studies to see how libraries are responding to this need…

Week 5: Reading more on RSS October 4, 2006

Although it seems a few of these library RSS feeds have since died, I still appreciated Gerry McKiernan 2004 article‘s compilation of library RSS links. The Ohio University ‘Business Blog’ especially intrigued me because it is done in WordPress and has a great survey up on the Sept 25, 2006 post. I suppose this is a privately hosted WordPress version?
I am glad of the Weblogs and RSS in information work article for this statement: “Libraries should be guiding users to appropriate weblogs, as they do for websites or discussion lists, though identifying those of value is more difficult since the proportion of ‘serious’ ones is lower.” And for demonstrating that another difficulty is keeping the links up-to-date, since a few on this article aren’t functioning – nor are some links on the pages linked to by this article functioning, like Library Weblogs featuring a dead link to our prof Amanda’s former blog, Bibliolatry. Too bad I can’t snoop any further! But returning to the point, I think it would be valuable for librarians to recommend blogs on particular subjects, just like the author of one of the blogs I ‘reviewed’ for this week’s paper has done with law library blogs on her site Novalawcity.

From the article Success Story: RSS Moves into the Mainstream at the University of Alberta Libraries, we learn how the feeds at U of A work: “The RSS feeds for New Books by Subject include second level LC classifications, allowing the user to subscribe to the feeds for TJ – Mechanical Engineering, and Machinery and TP – Chemical Technology, for example. A subscription to the relevant RSS feeds ensures that users will not miss any new books announcements, such as when they are away at a meeting or on vacation.” I had assumed for some silly reason that the feeds were linked to keyword searches so I’m glad I have been corrected. I am very excited about the obvious great uses of this service! At my co-op jobs I distributed table of contents services and CCOD’s, both of which took a lot of effort and felt quite robotic – RSS could help librarians get around these nasty mechanical duties & make libraries into impressive hubs of efficiency.

In regards to the Bloglines, Flickr, and del.icio.us make RSS delectable article, I’ve enjoyed getting my classmates del.icio.us tags in Bloglines for the past month. But can anyone tell me why you would want to use the service Philip mentions in his last paragraph, Pasta?

Week 1: Beginning the readings September 9, 2006

I write this post having just finished the first four readings (and gone on various tangents). The fourth reading on Shirky is the one that jumps out at me, the first three all being summaries of what I have already heard/read about ‘Web2.0’ and ‘social software’. I am enjoying the Shirky article because it talks about the delicate balancing act forums such as Slashdot perform in order to allow readers to comment, uncensored, while avoiding annoying other users with endless unrelated or offensive comments. I can think of many unhelpful comments I have read after articles on the Globe and Mail, which doesn’t have any means of moderation or the sophisticated ‘karma’ scheme of Slashdot.

Going back to Web2.0, I checked out A List Apart for the web desginers’ perspective, and came upon an article titled Web 3.0. Don’t get too excited – it doesn’t predict anything – but having just spent my summer co-op expanding my web design skills I found it helpful to know that the technologies powering web2.0 applications are commonly PHP, Ruby on Rails (I had to look that one up…), CSS, XML, XHTML, JavaScript and DOM.

As an aside, I can’t decide whether to leave out spaces entirely when tagging for my del.icio.us account (e.g. socialsoftware), or to use the underscore (e.g. social_software). Let me know what you are doing!