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The two talks I gave at the: International Workshop on Challenges and Visions in the Social Sciences, this summer, are now available at videolectures.net.
Not the best talks of my career, and hopefully not the last either. But the guys at VL did a great job in recording them.
One of the talk was about Tags, and the second about Democracy of the 21st Century.
In the one about Continue reading My first 2 talks available online: Tags & 21st Century Democracy
It is now the time to present the next project we have been working to: TagBay. And I say ‘we’, because is this project I am not alone. I did it with a friend of mine, Derek, who accepted, very patiently to code, some of the idea I have been tinkering around in the last year or so. I am speaking about how tags, and tag clouds, and distance between tags, and so on.
So, in brief we made a web site to tag material that is being sold on e-Bay. Anybody can tag any object that is being sold. Not only can any object be tagged but you can tag sellers, too (oh, we are not responsible for offensive tags, eh!).
Tags on objects can be made private or public, and you can also search among your tags, among everybody else tags, and eventually (when we code it) it will be possible to search among the tags of another user, like in del.icio.us.
Now that the summary for the people who have no time has been done, let’s try to explain the idea in the details for those who have a bit more time.
Pages:
On TagBay, right now, there are 3 type of pages: e-Bay Search Pages, TagBay Tag Search Page, TagBayUser Tag Search Page, Item Page, and Seller Page.
- Search Page: It is possible from inside Tag Bay to make searches on e-Bay on specific keywords. The user can then add tags to each object that came out, store the tags added all at once, or store the tags of a single object. The same thing can be done in the Tag Search Page
- TagBay Tag Search Page: In this page the user gets all the results for a single tag that someone have used. Nothing fancy (for now). Items where the tag only appears as a private tag will not appear here.
- TagBayUser Tag Search Page: In this page the user gets all the results for a single tag that he have used. If the user is logged in and is looking at his own tags, also the items tagged in a private way will appear.
- Item Page: Each object has its specific page. From such page any user can see what are the public tags that other users have used for that page. Also they can define their personal tags for that object, if their tags are going to be private, and the tags of the seller.
- Seller Page: And then there is the seller page, and in the seller page any user can tag any seller. The use of tag for sellers is still limited, but will be increased in the future.
The natural use of the site
- For a seller or for a shop A seller might want to use the site to tag all the objects that he is selling, giving for each object all the tags related. Thus increasing the possibility for it to be found. We suggest to list the tag in the order of importance, as soon we are going to use the order consider the importance in the search page.
Also, if a person wants to make a cool list of objects, they can tag exactly those objects, with a tag they never used, and then link to the page in their directory of this tag. Thus creating on the spot, their lists. Also sellers will want to tag their objects, and people making searches will tag objects to make lists of objects they want to follow, before jumping on a transaction. We think there is more than enough material to generate interesting behaviour. It doesn’t have to be exactly the same emergent behaviour that we are used to see. After all we are just exploring the possibilities of social folksonomy.
- A shop To the possibilities before, a shop who is selling on ebay might be interested to make sure that the shop itself (remember that you can tag sellers, and not only shops) have all the tags related to the merchandise that they are selling
- Someone buying Our suggestion for someone who wishes to buy, on e-Bay, would be to first look under the tag search, to see if there is anybody who has already tagged any object that they are interested in. This does not necessarily be someone else who is buying, but also someone who is selling. Then tag the objects they are interested themselves, to have it in their own list of objects. Then they could go to the search e-Bay page with the necessary keywords, and add the chosen tag to all the objects interesting. At that point a first selection have been made, and all the possible objects have been tagged. At this point, he could choose one or those objects, change the tags to private, and start betting on it.
- Someone suggesting And finally if someone is just trying to suggest some possible objects, he could search e-Bay for those objects, tag them with a unique tag and present the url of the list to whoever is interested.
There are many other ways to use TagBay. In a sense TagBay is a toy, and not a game. And as every good toy it can be used for many different games. We suggest here only some of them. Also TagBay itself is rapidly evolving. We have tons of stuff we are interested in including, and if you have been reading my blog, you know how my problem is always to find people to code my ideas, more than to find them. And this is why I am so happy for Derek work!
Difficulties that we found:
There were a number of issues that came out when we started developing this program.
- Public vs private tags:
Why would someone tag an object if they are interested to buy it? After all aren’t they making it easier to others to find it, by adding those tags?
This was a serious doubt that we had, and finally we decided to give the possibility to users to tag objects privately. Yet there have to be a balance between private tags and public tags, as public tags are necessary to generate the emerging folksonomy that we wish to use. So we decided for a compromise: public tags can be done from the search page, but private tags requite you to go to the specific object page. In our view (but we are ready to be proven wrong) someone would go to the search page, tag all the entries where he might be interested. Then chose one, and tag that one in a private way.
- Limitations due to the temporary nature of the objects
Considering that most object exist on ebay only for few weeks before being sold, wouldn’t this be not enough time to make a tag cloud and let all cool emergent properties that folksonomy induces, appear?
Maybe, but sellers also can tag the objects they are selling, thus giving a fresh start to all the objects. Also side by side to tagging object we are giving the possibility to tag sellers. Which eventually should survive each transaction and build up an interesting tag cloud.
- I spoke about sellers tagging their own objects, but wouldn’t this invite people to spam your site? After all, wouldn’t it be much better for a seller to add many tags to be present in many searches?
Ah ha! You think tag clouds can be spammed. This is false. Tag clouds cannot be spammed, and no one understand this. And we shall use this site to prove it. We have nothing against spammers, they are absolutely welcome in our site and spam it as much as they feel. Add all the tags they want to each object they sell. It will make ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE in the search page. Tag clouds are unspammable. And our engine will use tag clouds as its base. Everybody else uses tag sets. And this makes them easily spammable. So, no we don’t fear spammers. In fact we hope that spammers will come to our TagBay site. They are just people trying to sell their stuff, we are trying to make sellers meet with buyers. Wouldn’t be bad to single out spammers just because they are spammers.
TagBay is obviously still in beta, and there are many things that need to be coded. If you have any idea on how to make it better please do not hesitate to contact me. If you want to make a difference on what the final product will be now is the time to do it. Also all new suggestion implemented should be listed in a special page with links to the original suggester home page.
I think it’s the time to present what have I been doing in the last days. A number of improvement have beed added to this web site. In short I have upgraded to wordpress 2.0. I also moved to the next version of wikka. Some of you might remember that I offered some money to whoever could write some code to get the tag plugin to generate an rss list. I didn’t, at the time, explained why. I will now.
WordPress 2.0 gives the possibility to start categories on the fly. Just adding them, by listing them. Essentially this makes the category in wordpress work like tags (or keywords, for academics). But categories in wordpress also have an rss feed connected to them. Albeit with some bugs, like linking to the whole blog and not to the particular category. So I passed most of the first of January adding to the entries the relative tags as categories. So now I have no need of an rss feed for the tag page, as the tag page has been substituted with the category pages.
You also will rememer that I installed Wikka. The wiki engine. Now wikka is not only open source but also easy source. It is so simple that even I could hack the code. That is very simple! So I changed the code and inserted the possibility to have default pages. In short if before if you were to look for the url http://wiki.pietrosperoni.it/someunexistingpage and there is no page in the wiki called “someunexistingpage” the result would be that the wiki would ask you to edit the page, and you would be redirected to http://wiki.pietrosperoni.it/someunexistingpage/edit.
Now he would create on the fly the page someunexistingpage with the default content. And the default content I chose was the 4 rss feeds:
- the feed from my blog from the category: someunexistingpage
- the feed from my technorati from the tag: someunexistingpage
- the feed from my delicious bookmarks from the tag…
- and the feed from the popular pages in delicious, always from that tag
So for each tag I now have a wiki page with the most relevant rss appearing there. But being a wiki page I also can add other rss feeds, write definitions, comments, todo lists. In short modify it as I see fit.
Still it is not perfect. As it writes the page the first time, from that moment the page is set. I can delete it, but I cannot, for example, change the default content for all the pages that only contain the default content. I tried to write a plugin to do that, but I failed when I confronted the fact that I needed to write a plugin {{defaultpage}} who should have activated other plugins:{{rrs}}, for example. Something that I ignored how to do.
Also having the same string to work for delicious (as tag), wordpress (as category name) and wikka (as pagename) puts some heavy constraints on what the string might contain. For example I am already running ashore for all the tags that contain a dot inside (aaargh, del.icio.us!) or an accented letter (aargh, dear italian).
If you want to see how the pages look like just see the idea page. But any link from the right column (provided they have no dots inside or accents) will work fine.
I suddenly relised I don’t have the time to do all the things I was interested in (and keep what remains of my mental sanity). So out of need I decided to make the following offer.
The technorati tag plug in gives the possibility to have technorati tags, and for each tag a different page. What instead it does not offer is the possibility to have also an rss feed for each tag. So I offer 20 € for whoever makes the necessary changes to the plugin so that side by side to the tag page (here available at http://blog.pietrosperoni.it/tag/… ) I can have an rss feed of the entries in my blog with each tag (possibly at http://blog.pietrosperoni.it/rsstag/…).
The changes will have to be open source, so that they can then join the mainstream wp program. And be on that plugin. I know 20€ is not a lot, but I reason that for the right person this is a simple hack that might take half an hour. For me it would take ages (mainly because I need to understand how wp is working, and it’s not that trivial).
Oh, yes, I can pay via paypal. Or buy you something via Amazon, LJ, Flickr. Whatever.
And now to comment the above:
It’s interesting how the spreading of open source software also means the opening of a whole new market of people helping each other. I could never have made the above offer if I was using blogger, or lj.
Addendum: Since the new release of wordpress 2.0 includes the possibility to use categories as tags, the above offer is no longer valid. Sorry.
In the previous post I discussed how we can measure the relative importance of tags in a post, by calculating their weight, as
- weight of tag t= (number of people using t)/(total number of people)
I also said that:
Not only we could study a culture by studying the differences in the power law approximated by the tag clouds used by people of that culture. But we could even measure cultural eartquake by measuring the difference between the tag cloud being generated before a certain event, or after a certain event.
Independently Clay Shirky was coming at a similar conclusion, although he more focused on temporal changes that seem more signature of a particular subgroup of people all bookmarking a site at a certain time:
During a period of about 120 users’ additions of OIO, 20 or of them used the tag ‘ia’, putting it between #7 and #10 during that period. Now it is down to #17. This suggests that one or a few IA-oriented sites or mailing lists posted the link, and it got a flurry of attention from those taggers in a narrower window of time. This in turn suggests a conversationally tightly-knit IA community.
Through this tool we can see changes in the culture we are living in. We are used to feel those changes, but generally we never were able to measure them. Maybe now we might start to be able to do it.
But let’s go back to the tag weight. Terrell Russell took the ball, and in one evening of programming presented a tool to actually see how the weights change in time.
Nothing to say about the tool. It works perfectly well, and although it can be enhanced in many little ways, it already is very useful. Not bad for one evening.
More interesting, from my point of view, is how, through this tool we can see changes in the culture we are living in. We are used to feel those changes, but generally we never were able to measure them. Maybe now we might start to be able to do it.
No change
First of all I would like to show you the graph of a part of the culture where no changes are happening:
From the site: Nifty Corners. 1859 people having bookmarked it by now. The values soon converge to what we can expect to be their definite value (for the culture we are in).
Little Social-Quake
Continue reading Tagclouds and cultural changes
As I predicted a service on the net that offers an rss feed of blogs with a certain keyword / tag has appeared. It is It’s a Tag world from Stephane Lee.
The system seems still in its infancy (the name needs to be shorter, for start, to be used as a tag itself) , but by offering the rss feeds of blog entries they give a really valuable tool to the blogphere.
Now, either Technorati starts offering the rss feed itself, or sues Creative Mobs (enstranging a big part of the blogsphere), or accepts to coexist with another, potentially aggressive, competitor.
And indeed, it’s a tag world,
worse than that:
it’s a tag eat tag world!
Pietro
P.S. The system has also a certain humor and pragmaticity, the general tag page is called: ‘Guten Tag’ (german for ‘Good Day’). And each tag, has, in its header, a link to the equivalent Wikipedia entry (which works fine only in English, unfortunately, but still…).
Thanks Stephane.
As I posted the previous entry, I went to technorati to check if it was being pulled. And what I discovered was that technorati was only pulling the first tag in the list.
I make quite an effort to add all the tags that I think might be relevant. This both to improve visibility, and to better categorise the content. I like to make a copy of the same tags in my p.s.blog delicious account. And then see the whole thing as a mindmap. But for the mindmap to really work it is necessary to that if two entries share some content they should also shar at least a tag. So I use many tags. And the mindmap comes out really nice.
Not only this, but I feel that each post belongs to multiple tags, and should be present in multiple pages. For example this entry belongs to both the tag ‘technorati’, and the tag ‘mindmap’, ‘delicious’ etc.
Investigating a bit further I discovered this post, where a similar problem was presented. In that case technorati was pulling the information from the list of categories in the rss feed. Now the problem is that, in wordpress (other tag!), the list of categories is defined before, while the tags are defined after. And although this might seem like a minor problem, it actually means that often we don’t add all the categories that we need. In a sense it should be possible to just ask that wordpress uses tags as categories.
And then post the tags as:
<category>firsttagname</category>
<category>secondtagname</category>
So the end result of this is:
my posts are not appearing in the technorati page where they should: tag, technorati…;
my posts are appeariung in the technorati page where the shouldn’t :General, English…;
And I haven’t got a clue how to fix it.
Pietro
UPDATE:
I did send a mail to teachnorati, and I got this answer:
Hi Pietro,
Your tags must occur within the boundaries of a post, a div of class of storycontent in your case. Technorati should treat your Dublin Core subjects in your Atom feed as tags.
SECOND UPDATE:
After various tests, I realized that technorati does not parse the html, and I usderstood what the mail meant with Technorati should treat your Dublin Core subjects in your Atom feed as tags.. Since the author of the plugin explained that for a couple of more month he is not going to be able to fix it, in the meantime I downloaded another plugin: Technotag. That gives me the possibility to add <tag>tagname</teg> And that’s makes a tag automagically. Let’s hope that this works!
THIRD UPDATE: it works. And as I keep on making small hacks to the plugins that I use, I slowly learn how they work
FOURTH UPDATE:correction, it only worked for the first tag. But I hacked a bit the code and now it works fine on all. I shall send an email to the author, to pass him the change.
Before it would make a tag on every <tag>tagname</teg>, but all the tags would all point to the same address: The one generated by the first tag. Corrected. The new code is available here.
Rss is somehow one of the best ideas. You can have your content, stripped of form BS being redirected all around. This gives a one to many structure. Now we need the opposite. We need to be able to pull the content from many sites in the same place, and check it. A many to one structure.
Most of you will say, “But we already have that, it’s called an aggregator. Just look at bloglines.
Yes, and no, that’s part of it, but it’s not the whole story. We need to have a page that posts all the content from everywhere in a single page.
And again I can hear: “but we have that too: it’s called a technorati tag“.
Again I will repeat: Yes, and no, that’s part of it, but it’s not the whole story. We need to pull the information from the technorati pages to our aggregator.
This is the idea: we need an rss feed of a technorati tag. As we can get the rss feed of a del.icio.us tag, we need to have it for all the blogs. The time have passed to add to your friend list ALL the blogs that might have information of interest. We need to be able to add that rss to our bloglines.
So, either technorati will start releasing the rss, or I predict that:
- a) other services will start competing with technorati offering that info
- b) anonymous hackers will start scrapping the info from technorati to offer the very valuable information.
See also:semanticweb, tags
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