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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 have to say that I amvery impressed with Wikka. Wikka is a wiki software that I just installed on my web page. It is simple, yet full of plugins. Open source (or I would not consider it). It also permits to integrate freemind mind map inside it. More than this: for each page the administrator, (ehm, that is me!) can decide who is allowed to read, write and comment. I installed it about one week ago, and I avoided to make it public until I would found a way to deal with wiki spam. I already have too much spam on this blog. Finally I found what I think is the perfect solution:
- only registered user can comment and modify the wiki. It might not make it very fast, but at least I know who said what.
- I inserted a plugin such that to register people must write a password in the ‘registration code’. But the password is written on the same log in page.
- To write spam in the wiki they have to manually register. Which I feel is fair. I have no anger toward those that manually spam. Are the mechanical ones that ought to be stopped.
- If the spammers write something that automatically register, I will change the registration code.
- And if they write something that automatically grabs from the page the registration code I change the context (the phrase in which the code appears), making their software useless. I will move from:
- registration code:”pippo pluto” to
- registrati0n code:”pippo pluto”
As you cannot code for something that blocks all permutation of the word “Viagra”, so you cannot code for something that codes for all the permutation of the phrase: “Registration Code”. Ah! And this is the revenge of the mass!
I think the idea is so brilliant that I will look if I can find a similar plugin for wordpress.
The next think that impressed me in Wikka was the use of rss. It is actually very easy to integrate an rss in a page. Maybe it is the same in other wiki engines, I don’t know. But on wikka it is absolutely trivial. You just need to write {{rss url=”http://the.rss.net/address.rss” cachetime=”30″}} and the rss gets taken shown, and cached for 30 minutes. Now 30 minutes cache is what del.icio.us requires from you if you are going to connect an rss to your homepage. So now I have started to integrate all sort of rss from delicious to my web page. Check for example my Tag Cloud page. With the rss from my personal bookmarks tagged with tagcloud, rss from the popular page in delicious delicious/popular/tagcloud, and the rss from technorati (i.e. people who have blogged on Tag Clouds).
And all this is in the floating right bar. So I still can use the rest of the page as place for me to write content, and notes…
And as notes taker this wiki is slowly becoming. I started moving my Reading List to the wiki. And I added to the reading list, the rss of popular reading lists. You see, how it all comes together.
But this is not all! Wikka (and they should pay me after a post like this!) gives the possibility to set the privacy for each page. That is for each page you can chose who can read it, who can comment on it and who can change it. In this way I can use this not only as my personal notes but as the notes for project that I might be sharing with other people.
Come and say hello: http://wiki.pietrosperoni.it
Terrell Russell asked for some suggestion on how to improve his tool, Cloudalicious. He asked for it 3 times, one on the del.icio.us mailing list, and one on a comment on my previous entry, and one on his site (link missing as he wisely took this one off). Now I really think three times are too much, and Terrell should be heavily chastised for this. So I will write him a loong list of things that I think his tool should do, and maybe next time he will think better before asking people how should he employ his time as a programmer. I am always happy to give ideas to people, provided a) they remember me when the idea makes them incredibly rich b) they do the coding. Continue reading Cloudalicious suggestions
Note: This entry is connected also to a mindmap. Some people were having problems in opening the page because of that. As such the mindmap has been stored in a separate page, and can be viewed from here.
Introduction
As correctly pointed out by Jeffrey Zeldman tag clouds are becoming more and more popular. Yet I keep seeing services which should be using tag clouds that keep on using tag sets. It is not just a problem of programming a tool which can only support tag sets, but also but also of programming tools which might in principles produce tag clouds, but such that the users are not invited to use a tag if one already exists, and as such don’t generate a tag cloud.
Example of the first type of tools are Flickr, 43things, consuMating, tagsurf * , example of the second is the tagged version of the BBC* . In all those cases a tag set is used, where instead a tag cloud would be more appropriate. Some of the differences between a tag cloud and a tag set where explained in Vanderwal.net: Explaining and Showing Broad and Narrow Folksonomies. Let’s see them again, and see some consequences of those differences, which should clarify when is better to use one tool and when is better to use the other. Continue reading On Tag Clouds, Metric, Tag Sets and Power Laws
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