Technorati, Tags, Semantics
Grok Headline matches for Technorati, Tags, Semantics
Why Technorati tags don't
Why Technorati tags don't
02/01/2005 09:47 PMTagging has become the latest hype word-du-jour, mostly due to
services such as
del.icio.us,
Flickr, and now,
Technorati.
Clay Shirky and
others have written strong statements
for this
folksonomy
phenomenon.
I personally love tags. They are a very cool way of attaching
meaning to information - essentially put the semantics in the web in
the "Semantic
Web" sense, even if the metadata is dissociated from the
pages themselves. But as a non-English speaker I see a potentially
fatal flaw here: Most Internet users don't speak English as their
first language. Even if I speak decent English and use a lot of
English services, I still tag things in both English and my native
language.
And that means that tags will become "language polluted."
Take a look at the Technorati tag for "Macintosh&
;quot;, for example. Many of the blog entries are in Japanese.
If you look at Orkut, many of the parts of it suddenly became &a
mp;quot;owned" by Brasilians, which essentially drove
away English speakers (I haven't checked how they have handled this).
USENET coped with this by having separate hierarchies for each
country (so sfnet is all Finnish) and "accepted" languages
on each newsgroup. But tags don't have any way to determine the
language.
The situation is worse than it should be, because entries on RSS
feeds and blogs almost never state what their language is. In
fact, I would guess that most RSS feeds claim that the language is
"en-US" regardless of their actual content. People like me
write in two languages on the same blog. Atom has the possibility of
setting the language-per-entry, but I sincerely doubt that anyone will
bother to set the language, unless they are relatively passionate
about the subject.
There are three cases of "language collision" on tags
(I'm using English and Finnish as an example only here).
- The tag is different in English and in Finnish. For example
"fishing" and "kalastus". This should pose no
problem, as the folksonomies grow on each of the tags independently.
- The tag is the same in English and in language Finnish, but the
meaning of the tag is different. In this case, the dominant mass of
the users will "hijack" the tag.
- The tag is the same in both languages, but the web pages will be
in different languages. This is the case with things like trade marks
(Apple, Macintosh, Nokia), or when people like to tag Finnish pages
with English tags (like me: I use the word "blog" to mark
any significant articles about blogs, regardless of the language).
This reduces the usefulness of tags for people who do not understand
Finnish.
There is also an additional tagging problem with languages such as
Finnish: the same word can be conjugated and written in multiple ways,
depending on the context. It is somewhat the same as the problem of
using different words for the same concept, but it does make the
number of potential strings increase three-fourfold.
There are few solutions to this problem: and probably all of them
involve some sort of heuristic to determine the language of the tag
and the web page. Tagging is still a relatively new technique to be
adopted in mass classification of things, but in order for it to
become truly successful, one must still remember localization.
Otherwise, it will be the dominance of the masses
...
Technorati Tags 101 Screencast
Technorati Tags 101 Screencast
03/14/2005 05:34 PM We have the best users. I was blown away when I checked my Technorati
watchlist this morning to find a screencast done by Alex Barnett,
where he explains not only how he uses Technorati and its tags:, but
also...
Technorati Launches Tags
Technorati Launches Tags
02/01/2005 08:50 PM Tags are a simple, yet powerful, social software innovation. Today
millions of people are freely and openly assigning metadata to content
and conversations. Unlike rigid taxonomy schemes that people dislike,
the ease of tagging for personal organization with social...
Technorati launches Related Tags
Technorati launches Related Tags
04/09/2005 02:47 PM Ever wanted to see what posts are related to other posts, what tags
are related to others? Now you can! Just check under the Tag
description on most tag pages, like this one, or this one, and you'll
see...
Adding Technorati Tags with MarsEdit
Adding Technorati Tags with MarsEdit
02/01/2005 10:07 PMLaura
Lemay: “As part of this whole tagging experiment I wrote a
little applescript for MarsEdit to automatically insert the
‘Technorati Tags’ HTML at the bottom of each post... After
installing it, you use it by tagging your post and then just choosing
the script from the Script menu.”
A great introduction to Technorati tags
A great introduction to Technorati tags
03/14/2005 05:34 PM Wow, now this is what I call some contributed documentation!...
Technorati bl0gging tags: Good idea,
terrible implementation
Technorati bl0gging tags: Good idea,
terrible implementation
03/19/2005 03:09 AMHere’s an idea: what if when I wrote weblog entries about
General Motors, I included a special tag, a keyword tag, that let
everyone who wanted to read blog entries about General Motors read my
weblog article, without otherwise having to subscribe to my blog?
Makes sense. Now, should it be “gm” or “GM” or
“generalmotors” or “general motors” or
“General Motors” or “GM Corporation” or
… ? Therein lies the fundamental problem with Technorati…
Direct and
Related Links for 'Technorati blogging tags: Good idea, terrible
implementation'
Wists new features - exploiting tags to
improve a search engine - global search
over users, tags and items
Wists new features - exploiting tags to
improve a search engine - global search
over users, tags and items
03/14/2005 04:33 PMWe've added a global search feature to Wists. The search will look up
users, tags and individual item titles and...
Who Cares about Semantics Anyway?
Who Cares about Semantics Anyway?
06/05/2005 10:46 PM
On semantic markup, conveying its usage to those who generally
don't need to care, and a reusable markup guide for your enjoyment.
Semantics of Empire
Semantics of Empire
12/24/2003 08:16 PMRarely do his accusers charge that Saddam “tortured people,” “gassed
people,” “gassed Iraqis,” or “killed Iraqis.” A google search for ...
IBM Semantics Toolkit 1.0.0
IBM Semantics Toolkit 1.0.0
08/03/2004 08:14 PMA toolkit for storage, manipulation, query, and inference of
ontologies, etc.
The Semantics of Empire
The Semantics of Empire
12/24/2003 08:16 PMRarely do his accusers charge that Saddam "tortured people," "gassed
people," "gassed Iraqis," or "killed Iraqis." A google search for
"gassed his own people ...
Real world semantics
Real world semantics
02/18/2004 09:32 AM
At ETech (which I unfortunately could not attend) there was a
presentation entitled
real world semantics that is close in spirit to my own
recent experimentation. The presenters were Technorati's
Kevin Marks and
Tantek Celik, who fought
the good fight to bring quality CSS support to Microsoft's
now-abandoned MSIE/Mac. Phrases they use to define real world
semantics: "emerging semantic (x)html", "adoption by 'real people'",
"beyond academics and theoretical discussions." Exactly.
...lower case semantics
lower case semantics
03/14/2005 05:08 PM
Eric Meyer is giving
a session at SXSW called 'Emergent Semantics' - which (as opposed ot
Emergent Democracy) appears to be the religion of the day.
A RESTful approach - which ignores APIs, meta-data and many other
efforts and standards being established on the web today. There seems
to be a pre-occupatoopn with 'simple' is better, to the detriment of
working together with others.
Eric calls it a Ground up - grass roots effort - yet there are some
fairly formal things going on. Eric claims it's an evolutionary
approach and it's based upon established standards like XHTML. Yet
isn't XHTML fairly new itself?
Semantics get added in an ad hoc way. I certainly groove on that
idea.
But to refute server based technology, XML and APIs - seems a bit
extreme to me.
I've often wondered why some people differentiate between UPPER
case and lower case semantics. But from what I see - these lower case
folks seem to have their OWN dogma.
Issues:
hcal instead of iCal
(the rdf iCal.)
microformat instead of micro-content
(perhaps their defintion of microformat is at the single
verb/noun level - while I define micro-content tobe fairly richly
structured chnucks of content - specifcially content.)
XFN instead of FOAF
why only REST? Whatever happened to
XML-RPC and SOAP?
embedded in a page versus in a
file
XML vs RDF
XFN Me links and the MeNow
namespace
One thing that Eric and I agree upon - is the metaphor of
archipelagos.
I also like his notion of crossed links with XFN - ways to cross
breed and mutate these microformat ntions. Eric claims the pieces are
there now - maybe - maybe not.
But one thing I totally disagree with is - where's the meta-data?
Eric said "it's all meta-data" - then why avoid using the term?
No I don't wanna come off as some sort of RDF zealot - but I also
don't like to see one-sided thinking. In some cases - these standards
are just arbitray spin-offs - not necessarily grounded in any stable
principle other than "NOT rdf" or "NOT semantic web".
Why can't we work together?
What's wrong with a 'pseudo-schema' we all can agree upon BEFORE
it's 'rendered' into a specific distribution method? i.e.
pre-RSS ificiation. Or Atomization for that matter.
I really think 2005 can be the year that various viewpoints on how
to build standards - can come together - for the benefit of all.
"Don't pave the cow paths" seems like a really reasonable approach.
I just gotta wonder what's wrong with FOAFnet, meta-data and calling
it micro-content - beside sthet fact that someone else has defined it
and that they're associated with rdf.
Or maybe it's about an aritrary demand that nothing can be too
complex and that it MUST be really really really really simple. Maybe
they'll create their OWN subscription format called RRRRS.
ongoing · Metadata, Semantics and
All That
ongoing · Metadata, Semantics and
All That
11/10/2003 11:37 PMMetadata, Semantics, and All That .. Bray on the Semantic Web .. set
of thoughts .. talks
about
tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/11/09/SemWebFirstStep
track this
site | 5 links
WiFi hotspots should have semantics and
geotags
WiFi hotspots should have semantics and
geotags
03/22/2005 05:00 PMCory Doctorow:
Brad Templeton's got a neat idea -- add geotagging and semantics to
WiFi hotspots:
It would contain a mixed XML/HTML packet with a variety of useful
fields and general text. These could range from simple descriptions
("This access point belongs to Joe Smith, I'm a programmer") to
information ("On this site, Paul Revere stopped on his ride to consult
with local minutemen") to street directions ("Turn right to get to
highway 101, left for downtown") to, of course, advertising ("We sell
fresh fruit and have a special on plums today.")
In other words, a replacement for signs and billboards and markers.
And perhaps much more. Access points would also talk about themselves,
declaring, for example, if the owner is offering open internet access
for free or for fee, or has a local database of information, and what
class of information is in the main text. The local lattitude and
longitude for those without a GPS could be useful, along with local
maps data in a compact form.
Link
(
Thanks, Brad!)
Update: Felix sez, "plazes is collaborative geo-tagging of
networks, not just WiFi but any LAN. Unique identifier is the
router´s MAC ID. In addition to structured data like address and type
of network, people can upload pics and comments for that
plaze/network. Every network gets a linkable URL and right now, we are
working on a RDF representation of the geodata."
The Hills Are Alive With The Semantics
of Music
The Hills Are Alive With The Semantics
of Music
06/22/2004 04:11 AM
Tunes
create context like language : "musical notes are strung
together in the same patterns as words in a piece of literature".
Full
paper. On a
related note, hone your musical comprehension by playing with
Impromptu. Better
yet, co-ordinate it with this MIT OpenCourse -
Developing Musical
Structures.
Selling Text Ads/PageRank - Just
Semantics?
Selling Text Ads/PageRank - Just
Semantics?
07/27/2004 06:09 AM"What exactly determines who can sell PR and who gets nailed for
selling it? Does it really just come down to the sales presentation?"
W3C Holds Workshop on Frameworks for
Semantics in Web Services
W3C Holds Workshop on Frameworks for
Semantics in Web Services
06/17/2005 04:25 PM2005-06-09: The W3C Workshop on Frameworks for Semantics in Web
Services is 9-10 June in Innsbruck, Austria, hosted by DERI and
supported by EC's IST programme WS2 project. Over sixty organizations
are presenting papers identifying areas of shared interest between Web
services and Semantic Web communities. Topics include background
technologies, registries, taxonomies, search mechanisms, ontologies
for Web services, Web services choreography, and business process.
Read the press release, the program and about W3C Workshops. (News
archive)
Last Call: XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0
Formal Semantics
Last Call: XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0
Formal Semantics
06/05/2005 10:45 PM2005-06-05: Addressing comments from the previous Last Call, the XML
Query Working Group and the XSL Working Group released three updated
requirements documents and a Last Call Working Draft for the XQuery
and XPath languages. Important for databases, search engines and
object repositories, XML Query can perform searches, queries and joins
over collections of documents. XPath is used to select parts of XML
documents. Visit the XML home page. News archive)
Dave McComb on Business Semantics (a new
IT Conversation).
Dave McComb on Business Semantics (a new
IT Conversation).
11/11/2003 08:06 PMAs anyone who's taken on a large-scale multi-party integration project
will tell you, "the plumbing is the easy part." By far the greatest
challenges come from reconciling semantic differences between systems
and organizations. In this interview, Dave answers some of the hottest
questions in today's world of semantics.
In a recent essay, author Clay Shirky challenged the voracity of the
Semantic Web. Dave agrees in part, but goes on to defend the concept
and its importance to solving our profusion of data and our inability
to make use of it. Ever tried to use Google to search for anything
written by George W. Bush rather than about him? [Dave's recommended
book about the Semantic Web.]
We also discuss the quality of metadata and the challenges of tagging
performed by humans. Dave compares the simplicity of the ontology of
the species to an ontology for fine art, which virtually requires an
idiolect.
And don't we all remember the funny-if-it-weren't-so-sad incident of
the Mars Climate Orbiter, which crashed into the surface of the planet
because a function written to accept data in English units was passed
a metric-system value. Or was it the other way around? It's all about
semantics.
The Semantics of Free Software vs. Open
Source
The Semantics of Free Software vs. Open
Source
12/28/2004 04:54 PMMicrosoft's Solution To XP WiFi
Problems: Semantics
Microsoft's Solution To XP WiFi
Problems: Semantics
06/04/2004 11:05 AM
Going one step further than the "it's not a bug, it's a feature" type
of response, Microsoft has just gone a little nutty in trying to
defend themselves against
claims
that XP's Wireless Zero Configuration sometimes just drops the
connection without telling the user. First, they claim they've
never really heard of the problem, despite the fact that many have
experienced it (though, as the article points out, many blame the WiFi
hardware, rather than the software). However, one of the major
complaints is that the little connection icon in the task bar still
shows a connection, though no data is coming back from the access
point. When asked why the icon doesn't show the loss of connectivity,
Microsoft responds with this: "It indicates that you've associated
with an access point. It is possible for you to be associated without
having connectivity." Now, if you're techie enough (and many of you
are) it's not too hard to figure out what this means, but there's no
way the average user wants to care about the difference between
"associated with an access point" and "having connectivity." While it
may be useful to pinpoint that the problem does not have to do a
problem between associating the machine and the access point, why not
just have a separate way of indicating if there's no connectivity as
well?
Questions about Longhorn, part 2: WinFS
and semantics
Questions about Longhorn, part 2: WinFS
and semantics
06/07/2004 03:51 PM
In the
first
installment of this series of questions about Longhorn, I
concluded that the compelling benefit of WinFS must lie in the realm
of "organizing stuff" rather than just "finding stuff" -- else why not
just leverage existing and well-understood relational, free-text, and
XML search methods? And I posited that the signature feature of WinFS
-- "relationships" -- must be powerful enough to justify the creation
of a proprietary new storage model that will enable (but also require)
new applications and developer skills. Admittedly my "finding versus
organizing" distinction was a bit of a cheat, since finding depends
sensitively on prior organization. Except when it doesn't: brute-force
free-text search routinely trumps navigation and structured search.
But OK, we've all got to hope that better organization, someday, will
level the playing field.
...Reiser4 file semantics: An opportunity
for open source
Reiser4 file semantics: An opportunity
for open source
09/09/2004 05:28 AMSome people feel that the Reiser4 file semantics will present problems
for the Linux community. In a nutshell, every file now looks like a
directory and can be opened as a directory. The names in that
directory are not new files but metadata associated with the file, as
documented by Hans Reiser on the Namesys site. The immediate response
in the community has been that this is too big a change and should be
withdrawn. I humbly propose that this is a challenge we should face
head on now or we may not have an opportunity to do so in the future.
Red Hat Desktop strategy: Semantics have
been part of the messaging problem
Red Hat Desktop strategy: Semantics have
been part of the messaging problem
05/06/2004 11:28 AMEditor's note: This commentary from Red Hat's community relations
manager is a response to NewsForge's Joe Barr, who asserted earlier
this week that the company had given numerous confusing messages about
its intent to enter the desktop market. Much has been made in the
press and on community sites about Red Hat's ambivalence in the
"desktop" space. If you're reading this, you may have written an
article or two on it yourself. Or at least flamed us in your blog.
OWL Abstract Syntax and Semantics
Working Draft Published
OWL Abstract Syntax and Semantics
Working Draft Published
11/11/2002 03:18 PM31 July 2002: The Web Ontology Working Group has released an updated
Working Draft of OWL Abstract Syntax and Semantics. The draft is a
high-level description of the OWL Web Ontology Language 1.0 and its
subset OWL Lite. Automated tools can use common sets of terms called
ontologies to power services such as more accurate Web search,
intelligent software agents, and knowledge management. OWL is used to
publish and share ontologies on the Web. Read about the W3C Semantic
Web Activity. (News archive)
J2EE 1.4 release supports new XML and
Web services semantics (JavaWorld.com)
J2EE 1.4 release supports new XML and
Web services semantics (JavaWorld.com)
11/18/2002 10:56 AMRDF Primer, Test Cases, and Semantics
Working Drafts Published
RDF Primer, Test Cases, and Semantics
Working Drafts Published
11/13/2002 05:07 PM13 November 2002: The RDF Core Working Group has released updated
Working Drafts of the RDF Primer, RDF Test Cases, and RDF Semantics
(formerly named RDF Model Theory). The Resource Description Framework
(RDF) is a general-purpose language for representing information in
the Web. The primer is an introduction for all readers. The test cases
correspond to technical issues the Working Group is addressing.
Semantics specifies precise semantics for RDF and RDFS, with some
entailment results. Read about the Semantic Web Activity. (News
archive)
New X12 reference model specifies
structure for semantics in XML business
messages (WebServices.org)
New X12 reference model specifies
structure for semantics in XML business
messages (WebServices.org)
11/04/2002 11:43 AMThe Second Workshop on Semantics in
Peer-to-Peer and Grid Computing
The Second Workshop on Semantics in
Peer-to-Peer and Grid Computing
01/07/2004 03:02 PMThe Second Workshop on Semantics in Peer-to-Peer and Grid
Computinghttp://www.isi.edu/~hon
gsuda/SemPGRID042nd Workshop on Semantics in
Peer-to-Peer and Grid Computing at the
Thirteenth International World Wide Web
Conference 17-18 May 2004, New York, USA in cooperation with the
GGF Semantic Grid Research
Group (SEM-GRD)The Semantic Web is widely accepted as
a means to enhance the Web with machine processable content. However,
mostly the Semantic Web is aiming at techniques and technologies for
static information, in contrast to dynamic services or distributed
computing. Several interest groups and efforts are working on
infrastructure for enabling distributed computing. The organization of
these efforts are in part top down organized efforts, involving
multiple formal organizations and dedicated projects, and bottom-up
efforts, sometimes started by single organizations or individuals in a
grassroots effort.
The Grid is aiming at technologies which
allow the flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic
collections of individuals, institutions, and resources, enabling
virtual organizations. Problems encountered include authentication,
authorization, resource access, resource discovery, and interoperation
of active services. The same problems are eminent in the Peer-to-Peer
(P2P) area, where projects are typically organized in a bottom-up
fashion. Reusable infrastructures like SUN's JXTA are emerging,
attracting numerous applications. However, each application uses its
own data format, and it is hard to see how applications
interoperate.
A related area is Web Services: driven by
industry efforts numerous specifications are developed, which are of
interest for the Grid projects as well as for the Peer-to-Peer
efforts. Although there is an agreement that Web Services would
benefit from more semantics, little systematic research has been done
on the problem of how to combine the notions of Web Services with the
results of the Semantic Web, Peer-to-Peer and Grid computing.
The workshop will be organized in part around talks presenting
research results in the intersection of the Semantic Web, P2P and Grid
computing. Another important part of the workshop will be break-out
groups, focusing on the amalgamation of Semantic Web and distributed
computing. We hope the break-out groups will evolve into independent
working groups and generate follow-up activities, which contribute to
the technology areas. The proceedings will be published on the Web
and a workshop report will summarize the outcome of the break out
groups.
Mac tags
Mac tags
03/29/2005 05:06 PMWhy is it that it seems many more Mac owners decorate their laptops
with stickers than do PC notebook owners? Maybe it's because we PC
owners want to be able to re-sell our notebooks while Mac owners
assume they're going to own their machines till they wear them down to
the rims. [Technorati tag: macintosh]...
Hot Tags
Hot Tags
03/26/2005 07:40 PMNeat index on Flickr... In the last 24 hours hail, tourists, rodeo,
semanasanta, goodfriday, watercolor buddies, fullmoon, lamb, luna,
gravestone, diptych, stlouis, easter, uae, toddler, luke, religious,
nikon, friday Over the last week dilomar05, holi, pcforum,
sexyblogger, goodfriday, dilo purim,...
Look Ma, No Tags
Look Ma, No Tags
07/24/2002 06:29 PMXML's success can be measured not only in terms of deployment, but
also in terms of inspiring competitors. Kendall Clark examines one
such tagless competitor, YAML.
Tags and searching
Tags and searching
03/31/2005 09:37 AMHaving now looked at the way people are using tags on wists, it seems
like the most useful way to...
Do Tags Work?
Do Tags Work?
03/14/2005 05:56 PMI was sitting up and got pinged by Dave Sifry about Technorati’s new
related-tags feature; Technorati thinks that
Baseball is related
to
Sports,
MLB,
Football,
Basketball,
Natural
Philosophy (gotta love that), and
tickets. Some don’t
work that well, but the idea is compelling. I’ve been thinking about
this stuff a lot, and I have a question: Do tags work? It
shouldn’t be too hard to find out...
Tags and Stickers
Tags and Stickers
06/05/2005 10:49 PM
As I noted before in Tags
and Divergence and attempted to address in Emulating
Errors for Tag Convergence, tagging as practiced today could
use more convergence
features. While thinking about this and wiki-related problems, I
came up with stickers.
I came up with the idea of stickers when I remembered the opening
chapter of Snow
Crash in which a girl tagged a bad driver's car with a sticker.
Stickers on wiki entries?
Stickers on Flickr pictures? Stickers on links?
Stickers are like graphical tags that users can attach to text
or images. While
textual stickers can be applied likes tags are, similar to the way
adjectives work,
I think graphical stickers offer better user experiences. An open
system can allow
users to create custom stickers and variations of stickers (like
icons with modifier
pieces) to help users create a graphical language. Time and effort
needed to create
new graphical stickers is not a liability but a convergence
feature.
I think the best way to use stickers is to combine it with limits
in availability
and time. So a user gets N number of stickers of various types to
start with and will
get M more per week or month and each sticker type has specific
time limits (meaning
they come off after a while).
I am still not done thinking about stickers but I thought it was
interesting enough
as is.
SWAN Tags
SWAN Tags
02/01/2005 10:09 PMThis afternoon I did a presentation about information
shifting at the Downers Grove Public
Library for their staff in-service day. I modified it to include
more about online social networks since I’ve been drawn to the
topic lately. In the section on “library web services” and
user-centered vocabulary, I showed the progression from Flickr tags to Books We Like tags to SWAN
tags. I wanted to really drive the point home, so I did a mock-up
(click on it for a larger version).
Try to spot that word that
freaks out librarians. I think we can figure out a way to handle all
of this, though. Wouldn’t it be a cool way to browse the
catalog?!
Tangent: After the presentation, a staff
member came up to tell me that her daughter got a Zipit for Christmas. The woman
had been nodding yes throughout my presentation.
Tags and Divergence
Tags and Divergence
03/23/2005 02:32 AM
I've been looking at the way people using tags (not XML tags but
associating words
to lumps of text or pictures) and, so far, concluded that some form
of focusing mechanism
needs to be introduced to limit divergence of tags which leads to
the Tower of Babel.
I think one of the weak areas is exposure. Lacking exposure
to common tags causes
people to invent their own. But exposures out of context
contributes little
to convergence preceeding emergence.
Hmm. I think I'll wait for the flower to bloom in its own
time instead of screaming
at it.
Grok Description matches for Technorati, Tags, Semantics
GrokA matches for Technorati, Tags, Semantics
Technorati, Tags, Semantics
