Week 6- Readings & Case studies

Wikis

 

I have only looked at the top three case studies, up to now, for this week.  I will get to the others later, and if they are worth commenting on- I shall publicly critic them (I really hope people would be more merciful with my work).

Bull Run Library

I hate this wiki.  What is that all about? 

I instantly disliked it; and, I did not think I should spend time exploring why I dislike this wiki.   

Butler WikiRef 

I loved this wiki.  I loved the organization of the site and the presentation and many other things. 

The reasons why I liked:

• The first page itself gives an idea of what the wiki is all about. 
• The overall organization of the wiki is simple and the headings used are descriptive. 
• The little box that tells the essence of the wiki – this piece of information box has been able to encapsulate the total functionality of the wiki site very effectively.
• The content is VERY good.  It is apparent that this is not a large collection; and; though it does not follow any fancy structure, whatever the materials available is thoroughly and concisely covered in the content.

 The reasons why I DIS-liked:

• The only confusing thing that I found was, the dis-functionality of the breadcrumbs; which was a real throw-off.

Week 8 – Thoughts on wikis

Wikis

Though many scholars, professionals, and LIBRARIANS think wikis do not account for scholarly materials, we all use this tool, if not for in-depth research, at-least, as a way of making sense of things that are new to us.  I mostly rely on wikis to get acquainted with themes and ideas that are unfamiliar to me or to get a better grasp of subjects that are of contentious nature. 

 

There are few unique reasons, in my opinion, why people rely on wikis for familiarization

• Simplicity

• Diverse social opinions

• Unlike other Social software tools, Wikis enables multi- author environment

Simplicity

-         Wikis are usually written in simple language; and, usually the content could be understood by any reader. Contributing to wikis is also simpler.

-         Dissimilar to other social software, for some reason, people rarely get lost in wikis – this is my personal experience.

Diverse social opinions

-         Different people of diverse backgrounds contribute to wikis.  People who are at different educational, professional, demographic, and etc sectors may contribute to the same wiki.

-         And, thereby, creates a pool for cross-discipline, mixed-cultural environment that pools diverse experiences of a variety of demographic sectors to table their thought of a single theme in concern.-           

Unlike other Social software tools, Wikis enables multi- author environment

-         A single wiki may be edited and modified by many authors who are completely unknown to each other.

-         At the end, a piece on a wiki may be shaped completely different from what it started out to be.

-         This criterion, as I believe, is the most unique criterion of a wiki, which allows people to create a real-time, curative environment; while exploiting and utilizing the best of social software.   

Week 7 – case studies

I like the Librarything.com; I think that is a very neat way of getting on with the simple technology available and making the best out of it.  I liked it mainly because of the simple structure that enables one to get an immediate start.  Most of the technology thingies makes you take long awareness sessions (mostly through tutorials or tours) and by the time you end the tutorial you have forgotten the reason you went to the Website, in the first place – this happens to me a lot.  So I avoid these kinds of web-thingies.  However, I like this site.  It is sweet and simple !

Though not my favorite, I did like the PennTags.  It is very visual and, unlike many other tagging sites, it does not clutter your train of thoughts through busy visuals – which again irritates me over and above my tolerance level.  I spent a long time trying to figure-out the reason for the strong and effective visual impacts of the site, which somewhat followed the same criteria as Fliker, but had a much better structure to it.  I thought it was mostly due to following a practice “less is more”, the length of the tag annotations were kept to a minimum and on the tag cloud there were only a few popular tags and the rest were just tags– which is not the case with other tagging tools.  Many tagging tools that allow tag-clouds, have levels of popularity for the tags; because of which, almost all the tags gets a rank and they appear on the main page with different sizes according to their popularity.  As I perceive Web as a digital visual environment, too many variations is not a good strategy.  It would only confuse the reader. 

Anyways, the above are just my comments.  I am pretty sure you may NOT agree with me, but hay, it is just one person’s opinion!

Week 7

As mentioned in the Lee Rainie interview questions, Weinberger’s answer was that the usage of tagging would be increased in the future.  His reasons were the advancement in the technology trends as well as the users’ realization of the benefits provided by the Web-based content and the importance of acquiring the ability of managing these resources themselves.  As a person who is discovering these new trends, I too have to agree with his reasons.  However, I do see a problem with the finding viable mechanisms to deal with the overwhelming boom of information and the growth of ones own bookmarks and tags. 

As mentioned in my comments I also liked Hammond’s article; mostly because, his art of explaining and the pragmatic aspect of addressing the issues. I have to say that I particularly like the quote on his piece on tagging mentioned below, the quote has managed to extract the essence of the tradeoffs of the tagging tools.

“Ontology is a good way to organize objects, […], but it is a terrible way to organize ideas, and in the period between the invention of the printing press and the invention of the symlink, we were forced to optimize for the storage and retrieval of objects, not ideas.“

Comments – Leah’s blog

I like Hammond’s article as well. I think he explains technical issues in a simple manner.  I particularly like the quote on his piece on tagging mentioned below.  It exemplifies the two edged nature involved with tagging and all other technological tools.

“Ontology is a good way to organize objects, [...], but it is a terrible way to organize ideas, and in the period between the invention of the printing press and the invention of the symlink, we were forced to optimize for the storage and retrieval of objects, not ideas.“

Social software – Tagging

What is Tagging?

In summary, Tagging is a process of annotating web-based content with user defined metadata. 

The internet has contributed towards the information boost a great deal.  The Web is a vast, unstructured, and encompasses information formation of all kinds.  Consequently, finding information on web posses challenges.  Though, there were talks about indexing and categorizing web content, correctly indexing the web by designated authorities has its own challenges – it is almost impossible. Therefore, tagging is a smart way of alleviating these difficulties. 

Tagging, a process that focuses on individuals’ managing the Web-based resources by employing ones preferred mechanisms and criteria for personal use; it gives the elements human-readable names while allowing the human eye to more or less correctly interpret the purpose of certain Web content.  The tools that facilitate tagging also provide facilities of sharing the tagging and the tagged materials, while allowing individuals to management their own web resources. That does not mean tagging has no commercial benefits to organizations, projects and organizations use tagging for their professional advantages as well. A ‘not so common’ use of tagging is creating organizational specific resource bases; for example, to generate ‘spatialized’ notebooks from online collections of primary and secondary sources.

Elements of Tagging

§ Keywords / Tags – A term assigned to the URL according to the personalized taxonomy

§ Tag descriptions – A personal description given to the tagged material other than the keywords.

§ Notes – Any specific remarks that could be made on the tagged content

§ Tag clouds – Collection of the tags. A weighted list in visual design that can be used as a visual depiction of content tags used on a website.

§ Networks – the subscriptions to a certain tagging network

Few good, working Tagging tools

§ Flickr – An online photo sharing site,

§ del.icio.us – A site for tagging and sharing Web sites (articles, blogs, music, restaurant reviews, and etc)

§ Technorati  – A popular site for exploring creator-tagged blog entries. Started out as a blog search engine and the tagging was later added as a feature.

§ LibraryThing – An application of tagging to personal book collections. It can pull bibliographic information from the Library of Congress or amazon.com, saving users the time of entering this information manually. A free account allows a user to tag and manage up to 200 books. The site also features disambiguation mechanisms whereby users can tell the system that two books represent the same work, or two authors represent the same person. Perhaps LibraryThing’s most important and innovative feature is providing recommendations for new books to read based on the tags a user has applied to his collection.

§ PennTags  – A tagging site intended for the University of Pennsylvania community. In addition to tagging Web sites, PennTags allows users to tag records from the Penn online catalog and individual journal articles. It represents an interesting move by a library into the tagging community.

§ Steve – An initiative from the museum community to harness the efforts of knowledgeable users in describing museum resources. Steve is unusual for a tagging initiative in that users don’t select their own resources to tag, but rather are presented with system-selected resources for tagging. It remains to be seen if the data produced by tagging in this type of environment results in the rich data provided by users describing their own resources.

§ Connotea – A tagging site intended for “researchers and clinicians” to “keep links to the articles you read and the websites you use, and a place to find them again.” It markets itself as a way for scientists to organize scholarly reference lists, and originated from the Nature Publishing Group.

§ TagSurf – An experimental forum based on tags.

Importance of tagging

Tagging, a process that focuses on individuals’ managing the Web-based resources by employing ones preferred mechanisms and criteria for personal use, gives the elements human-readable names while allowing the human eye to more or less correctly interpret the purpose of certain Web content. Most of the classification schemes (i.e. taxonomies) are based on professional expertise and are difficult for lay-people to understand the reasoning behind these taxonomy schemes without having a knowledge of the classification scheme; on the contrary, tagging allow the users to generate, or create, or mine their own content, and classify the content according to the user’s unique way, that makes most sense to the user.

Future of Tagging

Tagging may advance in several simultaneous threads

Thread of Tagging technique

§ Using facets in a tagging environment – mutually-exclusive controlled vocabularies are used in parallel. For example, an art work would be classified name of the artist, the name of the place it was created, genre, etc.

§ Use of pre-coordinate tags – that provides rich semantic meaning; fro example, a taxonomy.

§ Use of clustering – use descriptive clusters to categorize URLs in to meaningful clusters

§ Use of roles – assigning ULRs on to roles according to the URL’s purpose

§ Use of special search engines for tag searching – Wink is a search engine that lets you find the results that others think are most relevant. It combines results from all the most popular tagging sites and then adds Google to fill any gaps. (skip to Wink is a search engine that lets you find the results that others think are most relevant. It combines results from all the most popular tagging sites and then adds Google to fill any gaps. (by Andy Beal – more on “Wink’s Michael Tanne Discusses the Future of Tagging“)

Thread of Usage

There would be specialized tag cloud-implementations emerge for a variety of semantic fields and focuses: good specific – brands, cars, homes for sale, hotels, travel destinations, etc.  That would advance business ventures exploring the potential value of aggregating and exposing semantic fields for a variety of strategic purposes: creating new markets, changing existing markets, providing value-added services, etc.

 - The importance of the concept of tagging and its usage keepse growing. And, with a few best practices in-place, these tools could be directed towards greater benifits; however, I am not sure where it is heading towards or what the future may impose on the tagging tools as technology and the demand people place on it, keeps changing and it is difficult to predict future of technology- 

Problems with Tagging

§ Many search engines do not make them easily searchable

§ Keeping the tags organized is a complicated job.  If you are a regular tagger, it is very easy to get confused with your own tagging – we can be left with unmanageably large lists

§ The process is slow and could also be annoying – tagging requires continuous refining and developing our own taxonomies if we’re going to keep track of your tags.  Everybody may not have a good idea of taxonomies. And, many taggers realize the need of taxonomies mostly at a latter stage.

§ Unsystematic tags – the tags could be unreliable and inconsistent due to

• Polysemy – words which have multiple related meanings; for example, a window can be a hole or a sheet of glass

• Synonyms – multiple words with the same or similar meanings

• Inflections/ meta-noise – such as with plural forms, “cat” versus “cats”

 Advantages of tagging

§ Data mining for research and projects

§ Creating subject specific HTML portals / repositories

§ As a virtual ground of sharing information among individuals who are geographically distributed

§ The taxonomy could be customized based on the subject/ discipline/ specialty  / or individual requirement

§ The readers could keep track on the popular and hot topics to keep current with a chosen field

§ The possibility of the contributors work being peer reviewed

§  And, the above resources are only tagged and not saved by the sharing community the contents are up-to-date and current.

The concept behind Tagging on Web 2.0

Web2.0 main focus is to promote web-based communities through social networking tools, wikis, folksonomies, etc. Also, Web 2.0 is in part about using new technology to bring our web-use more in line with the free-form and hyper-efficient working of the human mind. The text which are extracted fro Web 2.0 technical notes briefly elaborates the concepts behind tagging in Web 2.0.  

Tagging taps into an existing cognitive process without adding add much cognitive cost. At the cognitive level, people already make local, conceptual observations. Tagging decouples these conceptual observations from concerns about the overall categorical scheme. The challenge for tagging systems is to then do what the brain does – intelligent computation to make sense of these local observations, and an efficient, predictable way to ensure findability.  When you tag your digital objects well and when the underlying programming of the tagging systems is good. Then, we’re really getting somewhere in Web 2.0 world. Understanding how the thought processes in Web2.0 work is essential to pulling this new media experiment off.

References

Del.icio.us,2007<http://del.icio.us/help/tags>(accessed June 20, 2007)

“Dublin Core – Tagging the Web for better search and retrieval”, internet.com, <http://www.webreference.com/xml/column24/>(accessed June 20, 2007)eWeek.com, 2007,  <eWeek.com> (accessed June 20, 2007)

Flickr,2007 <http://flickr.com/learn_more.gne> (accessed June 20, 2007)

Furl,2007 <http://www.furl.net/faq.jsp#howNotBook>(accessed June 20, 2007)

Green. Heather, Hof. Robert D., “Picking Up Where Search Leaves Off”, businessweek: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY 2007, <http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_15/b3928112_mz063.htm> (accessed June 20, 2007) 

Hammond. Tony, Hannay. Timo, Lund. Ben , Scott. Joanna , “Social Bookmarking Tools: A General Review”, D-Lib Magazine 11, no 4 (April 2005).

O’Reilly. Tim. “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software” September 30, 2005 , O’Reilly, http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html, (accessed June 20, 2007).Pew Internet and American Life Project January 31, 2007, <http://www.pewinternet.org/reports.asp> (accessed June 20, 2007)

Psfk.com,” Geo-Tagging The Web” <http://www.psfk.com/2007/06/geotagging_the_.html>(accessed June 20, 2007)

Technorati,2007 <http://technorati.com/help/tags.html>(accessed June 20, 2007)

Terdiman. Daniel, “’Tagging’ gives Web a human meaning”, CNET News <http://news.com.com/Tagging+gives+Web+a+human+meaning/2009-1025_3-5944502.html> (accessed June 20, 2007)

Yahoo 2007,  <http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/myweb2/index.html>(accessed June 2007)

Wikipedia 2007,  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_%28metadata%29>(accessed June 20, 2007)

Wikipedia 2007, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags>(accessed June 20, 2007)