Some people who work with me are probably sick of me talking about how much I love del.icio.us, but I don’t care. I really love del.icio.us. If I was on some weird desert island where I was forced to only choose one Web 2.0 tool (maybe the desert island is run by some tribe of people with strange network policies?), I would choose del.icio.us.
I know what you’re thinking:
Woman! Are you crazy?! Wouldn’t you choose WordPress, the single best blogging platform in the world? After all, isn’t the blog at the heart of Web 2.0 goodness?!?
Nope. I’d choose del.icio.us, because — guess what!? — if I was really desperate, I could use del.icio.us like a blog! Ingenious! Granted, the character limit would mean my posts would have to be uncharacteristically brief, but that’s okay. It would help focus me, right?
Okay, I’m digressing from my point a little. But the digression is really just an attempt to make it really clear how much I love del.icio.us. It’s also an attempt to make the point that in it’s deceptive simplicity, del.icio.us is actually an incredibly complex, adaptable, powerful tool. We should all seek to better understand that power — and use it for good.
(BTW, did I mention. . .I love del.icio.us?)
Recently, Alan blogged about how hard it can be to get a group of people to tag Web Sites of Interest around a particular topic. I have no doubt that fostering this kind of activity is really hard, and as much as I love del.icio.us, I feel his pain. And, so it is with some trepidation that I’m about to announce a project to get a group of people to tag Web Sites of Interest around a particular topic. (But I’m coming back to Alan’s dilemma, so stick with me.)
The topic is “Fear,” and the project it’s for is the upcoming session at ELI 2008 that Laura Blankenship, Barbara Ganley, Barbara Sawhill, Leslie Madsen-Brooks, and I will be presenting. The title is “Who’s Afraid of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and the Big Bad CMS? A Digi-Drama About Fear 2.0 “. Here’s the abstract:
Web 2.0 tools have the power to transform education. Such a transformation requires that faculty, students, and institutions take risks. With those risks comes fear, which is often unarticulated. How do you tackle this fear and make real change? Join us to face this fear together in a multimedia, interactive miniplay.
We know exactly what we want to do for this presentation, of course. I mean, we’re completely ready. Honestly. But, since we have all this networked Web 2.0 goodness available to us, we thought it might be nice to give those people who are part of our various Web 2.0 networks a chance to contribute their own views, impressions, and even interpretations of the fear that this technology is creating at their institutions. We’re all about the giving, really.
Of course, the tool we’ve chosen to aggregate whatever is contributed is del.icio.us. The tag we’ve chosen is eli08fear. And, while we could just monitor the tag page in del.icio.us and even point to it during the presentation, I thought it would be interesting to see if we could foster some other kind of context for the bookmarks that might emerge.
So, to that end, I’ve set up a blog at fear.umwdtlt.org and used a nifty little script called WordPrecious
to pull the tagged bookmarks into the blog. What’s cool about this script is that it doesn’t just create a daily aggregate post of the latest bookmarks — it creates an individual post for each bookmark. Posts that can then be commented upon within the blog environment. Isn’t that cool?
It actually may present a partial answer to Alan’s question that I mentioned above. I would suggest that part of the answer to getting a community of users to participate in a group bookmarking project might be to create some kind of community conversation/context around that activity. Del.icio.us is a great tool for capturing, tagging, and annotating. But it’s not designed to foster the subsequent conversation that could be generated by the bookmarking activities.
WordPrecious is just a small step in this direction. There are a lot of ways in which I think it could be further improved. For example, it would be cool if the name/id of the bookmarker could be included in the post that’s produced. It would also be cool if the tags associated with the bookmark could be turned into blog categories/tags — and then used to slice and dice the blog posts in interesting ways.
Right now, anyone with an account on the blog can go in and edit the blog posts that are produced, so today I manually edited one of the posts that was pointing to a YouTube video so that the video played through the Anarchy player in the post. It’s not a huge deal to check the blog and do this periodically, but it would be cool if links to YouTube or Google Video could automatically be made to play in the blog post. That’s probalby tricker. But, hey, I’m not in the mood to reflect on what’s tricky! I just want to think about what would be neat.
So, PLEASE contribute to our project by using the tag eli08fear (and the more annotation you can provide in del.icio.us the better), and then PLEASE subscribe to the blog feed, and then PLEASE consider commenting on anything that appears in the feed that you think is interesting. I will personally give a chocolate-covered cashew to anyone who participates whom I run into at ELI. Is that enough incentive?
Update: For those interested, the feed for comments is available at http://fear.umwdtlt.org/?feed=comments-rss2.
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This probably responds both to this and to the Cog Dog….
I suspect that one reason for the difficulty is that, too a large degree, this kind of use/function of tagging goes against something at the essence of tagging: its close affinity to natural language.
If tagging is a folksonomic thing (in contradistinction to taxonomic), then the interesting effects come from people using the words that come to mind as the tags. Its an association game. That’s where the network effects come from.
But something like what you and Alan describe doesn’t have that affinity to natural language. (Notice the gymnastics we go through to choose a tag that will be as unambiguous as possible.) I’ll go so far as to say it isn’t at all folksonomic. Instead, it’s a taxonomy–a taxonomy consisting of exactly one term.
(If, reasonably enough, you say that a taxonomy must consist of more than one term, think of it this way–the taxonomy tree has two main branches–the relevant and the irrelevant. The relevant branch consists of exactly one tag: the one you are using (e.g., eli08fear). The irrelevant branch consists of all other tags in the known universe).
So another part of the answer might be in thinking about how investment in other taxonomies is generated. We can put authority to the side, I think. But usefulness of the taxonomy is always essential. To that end, something that fosters conversation around resources with that tag is a great step forward (and so a feed of recent comments would be very happy, too!).
Ahh…you are really onto something here! But I also want to repond to PMJG’s comment. It seems to me that with deli.cio.us you get something other than just taxonomy or just folksonomy. There are multiple tags for each post–multiple for me the tagger and then also multiple for the site itself as other users give it multiple tags. It gets very interesting when one does the slice and dice Martha describes! SO when Patrick talks of the relevant and the irrelevant, I am perplexed. There is only one relevant (e.g.eli08fear) for one person’s purpose at one moment in time, but I wouldn’t characterize the other tags as “irrelevant.” where I agree though is that, all this aside, when conversation is generated and afixed to the tagged site, something new and useful is happening!
Terry,
Hiya! I think I’m getting a bit abstract again….let me try it from a different tack…..
The relevance/irrelevance comes from the use of the one tag for a particular, well-defined, special purpose. Yes, in the bigger scope of de.licio.us the _collection_ of tags on a site gets you something much more. But, what I think Martha and Alan are describing is a more closely defined situation, one that uses that one tag to say “We are establishing a convention (!) in which this is the one tag we ask you to use to identify material relevant to this one thing (event/conference/presentation/topic/whatever).”
So for that one purpose, being a convention for associating sites with a thing, all the other tags are irrelevant–they don’t serve that purpose.
You’re certainly right, though, that when we extend things a bit all the other tags that are _also_ used can start to tell us a lot about that one thing.
Patrick
I see. We are on the same page. And Martha and Alan are, I guess, less concerned with the name itself than with getting people to do this at all! (right?) To that end, let me say that few people I know have been using delcious enough to realize its poetential. Hooking it with the blog and allowing conversation could really take this to a new level. Is this a case of Martha having her cake (or cashew) and eating it too?
We’ll see!
Terrific post, in the original and current (slang, really) sense of the word. Renaissance pedantry issuing into feeble humor; move on, nothing to see here.
Have you seen the movie “Defending Your Life?” If not, you must see it right away. I’ll buy you a copy. It’s highly thoroughly eerily terrifically relevant.
Pull quote: “He faced his fear! He faced his fear!” Plus it’s one of Meryl Streep’s best performances, I think. The pasta scene alone is worth the price of admission.
OK, done.
Patrick and Terry — Thanks for the perspective and conversation on the folksonomy vs. taxonomy part of this. I think you’re spot on. There *is* something different about using someone else’s “functional tag” as part of your bookmarking activities in addition (or instead of) to your own, instinctive tags. To me, part of that really does have to do with the fact that while we call this “social bookmarking” we rarely think about what we’re doing as collective. It seems to be very driven by our own self-interest. And, so, I do hope that the context/conversation could make this feel a bit more like a shared endeavor. We’ll see.
I also realized from your comments that I hadn’t put the link to the comments feed up on the fear blog. So here it is: http://fear.umwdtlt.org/?feed=comments-rss2. I’m updating the post with that information, and it’s in the blog’s sidebar now, too.
Gardner — I saw Defending Your Life on my first date with my first, ever boyfriend, if I remember correctly. But I don’t remember enough of it to figure out how it’s relevant. Now, I’m really intrigued and logging into NetFlix.
just testing to subscribe to comments in WP 2.3
Hello all,
This is really fantastic - I love this idea, and the Got Fear blog looks great and should work very well as a center for resources and discussion about individual items.
As far as the tag discussion, is there a significant difference if this process was changed slightly? For example, what if you created a del.icio.us account with the name “eli08fear” and had persons add that blog to their network and send “eli08fear” the relevant links. Instead of a tagging, the users are sending that link to a person/organization/class.
This process would not be as automatic as what Martha has set up because this would involve a “moderator” in the person of the owner of the “eli08fear” account to regularly check the links sent to them from their network, and approving them, but in some instances the moderation might be wanted/needed.
oops -forgot to add one point.
By sending to a person/organization in their network instead of having to assign a predetermined tag, this might be easier that trying to find/remember a specified tag (especially if someone has thousands of tags). I could image it being much easier to scan my list of who is in my network, seeing “eli08fear” and remembering that it is the right place to be sending this item to than scanning my list of hundreds of tags if I forgot which one it was, especially if the predetermined tag is a bit cryptic (as they often can be if you want to find something truly unique for your situation).
It might also work better since they probably have a smaller number of persons in their network to sort through compared to the number of tags they have.
Jerry,
Alas, to view tags for someone, you must be that someone. To get at that info, then, you’d need some middleware to grab and process stuff from that account. And, if one person wanted to make a whole bunch of things that worked that way, they’d quickly run out of email addresses for registering new accounts.
But the basic idea is good…I really do think this reflects an important Web 2.0 evolution: the discovery that tags only go so far, and then we need something beefier to pick up where tagging leaves off.
I’m workin’ on it…..
What a fab post, Martha- I love what you love, and fortunately, we are not required in our web 2.0 love to be monogamous, we can love many
And I’m looking forward to your session at ELI; great use of the tools you have going here.
In terms of my original “why the _____ don’t people tag” rant, it has settled in that there are not singular answers; it depends on the group, it depends how the request/tags are disseminated, it depends if it is a temporal thing (tags for conferences, events) versus ongoing efforts.
I really appreciate Patrick’s analysis of folks/tax -onomies in the way these tags are used. My response is… well sometimes a taxonomy is good, right? The main reason for a fixed tag, cryptic as they become, is they serve as an over arching organizer and to help steer content to syndicated sites, etc.
And the beauty is, del.iciou.us provides room for both. For my “taxonomic” tags, I am still layering my descriptive ones on top, and they end up in the same, giant, “everything is miscellaneous” pile. While I am tagging things for this year’s horizon project (hz08) I am using sub tags to categorize those, free form ones so I can use them myself, and sometimes cross tagging with some of the other taxonomic tags I use for projects.
The unsaid thing is to be effective, I somewhat need to keep these things on the periphery of my consciousness as I scan the web- so when I tag I can remember our Horizon project, stuff I tag for virtual worlds, stuff I tagged for my visit to Australia, Martha’s presentation– what are the limits there? I dont know.
The almost last point, and getting at Jerry’s idea- the thing about it I love is it is quick (with a Firefox extension or a bookmarklet) so I can do so w/o a whole lot of interrupting of the flow of “looking at stuff”. So in some cases, you may get to the community involvement Martha is aimed at building, but that too takes separate time and attention. For many things, I just want to tag, let del,icio.us and associated tools, plugins automatically publish, syndicate, etc.
While I understand the reasoning Jerry put out, to me, it adds layers of complexity to the process- the person(s) maintaining the account have to process links (though in some cases editors may be useful) but you lose the immediacy of making resources available. The other downside is managing multiple del.ico.us accounts- as is, I have several accounts, and must keep them in separate web browsers.
Am anxious to see how the “fear” play turns out. Great concept!
Alan,
I’m definitely on board with the virtues of taxonomies…no need to convince me there!
Patrick
Interesting post Martha! And I can already think of some uses for the “shared tag to blog post” model.
I agree with you that “while we call this ’social bookmarking’ we rarely think about what we’re doing as collective.” I think this may be due to the fact that the “social” in a lot of Web 2.0 tools seems to focus more on sharing than on collaboration (with the exception of wikis).
Which may be why folksonomy (which is excellent for self-interest uses and even sharing) doesn’t work so well for collaboration. You need to collectively agree on your tags to make the collaboration possible. You almost need a “consens-onomy”.
Seems like we are at the point where Web 2.0 tools are failing us. We have personal interactivity and sharing down (this is how I see Web 2.0), now we want truly collaborative tools. Maybe we need Web 2.5?
As an aside, Defending your Life is one of my favorite movies. I knew there was some reason I liked Gardner!
New twist, a wee bit off topic, but maybe relevant. By the way, I’m going to coin the phrase “on tagic”, which is kinda like being “on topic”, but with respect to tags. You read it here first.
The twist is that, while you invite responses with the tag “eli08fear” on del.icio.us, this post doesn’t carry that tag, either as category or tag or whatever WordPress invites you to call it. That’s interesting, because it suggests very different organizational spaces — one space for your blog, and another for del.icio.us. That might very well make very good sense, and I observe it not to say something is amiss. Instead, it might suggest something important about how documents on the web — and the relationships between them — might need to be organized. And so, all the things that people might post to del.icio.us would be on tagic to this post, even though they carry different tags.