ext337

Oct 5, 04:51 pm: [Web 2.0] What's in a tag?

[all the disclaimers of live blogging apply—misspellings, mistakes and misunderstandings]

Presenters:

• Joshua Schachter, del.icio.us
• Tantek Çelik, Chief Technologist, Technorati
• Caterina Fake, Flickr
• Tony Stubblebine, Lead Software Engineer, O’Reilly Media, Inc.
• Jeff Veen, Partner, Adaptive Path

Session description:

What is tagging? Find out why tagging represents a shift in the way users are remembering, sharing and discovering content on the Internet. Joshua and his panelists will discuss how user generated information is helping to organize what the world thinks is important.

Session notes:

• general introductions
• Stubblevine: use of del.icio.us data—looking at bookmarked/del.icio.us’d data gives you more than traffic stats; it tells you that something is not just worth reading but worth saving.
• Fake: tags—networked keywords—helped to see the pool of information from other people.
• Veen: tags gives you multiple ways to group and view information—your own—that gets magnified when connected to overall information architecture on the web
• questions from the room: am I using tags the best way, I don’t quite get it, how should I tag?
• let the programming develop the semantic relationships to help make tagging more useful (flickr clusters)
• reasons to tag:
  • technorati: tagging for others; for distribution
  • del.icio.us: tagging for yourself; for organization
  • flickr: tagging used in both ways
  • the reasons influence the ways you tag
• problem of synonyms: is it the systems job to figure it out or is the user (isn’t that what clusters get at? make that merger transparent rather than just doing it for the users. a way of broadening the tag search; related tags functions also help get at this)
• Fake: not just tags but if there is a bunch of photos taken at the same time and in the same place and their are network links, you can derive a lot of backend information about this and so join them
  • again, it seems to me that the key is to make this joining transparent and not just do it for them.
• from the room: what happens when spammers start to game the system?
  • definitely a challenge; some ways to measure behavior to indicate that the behavior is consistent with spamming
• use technorati tags a way to get in on the conversation
• Çelik: difference between tags and meta keywords; meta keywords are invisible and so there aren’t social pressures to be accurate, you can’t tell that a page as 200 metakeywords; the keywords easily become out-of-sync with the pages
• Veen: displays semantics and linked relationships
• Fake: allows people to participate in the organization of the web with a click; just by saying “I like this.” (what I was trying to get at here
• tagging to be used to organize a companies intranets; del.icio.us behind the firewall
• how do you deal with time?
  • contributes to decay in popularity/interestingness
  • flickr provides a good way of viewing tags—last 24 hours, for example
  • time-based tags matter differently on upcoming.org then on flickr or del.icio.us
• Veen: tagging is about giving up control of my information architechture to my users
• Çelik; auto-tagging/geo-tagging isnt’ tagging; that’s metadata; the beauty of tagging is that it’s human entered information
• Schachter: tagging is about meta and user interface; latitude and longitude is a just meta data. It doesn’t have the user interface aspect.

Other notes:

• Greg Yardley
• Silkworm Blog, 1 , 2, 3, 4, 5

tagged: web2con, conference, nptech, net2, tagging