vanderwal.net

Snippet on Getting Folksonomy Right

Today's summary on folksonomy... taxonomies and ontologies can help the many find information, but never help the whole of the people. The role of folksonomies is to fill in that gap to get far closer to the whole.

The failure that Google noted in other search companies in 1997 being happy with getting 80 to 85 percent of the correct answers for people, meant 15 to 20 percent of the people found the tools failed them (for me it seemed far higher than a 20 percent failure rate in 1998, which is why I switched to Google quite early). There are far too many that are complacent with their development of taxonomies and ontologies that are only helping the many and have no desire to change their practices to get to closer to the whole. It takes a diverse toolset to get the job down, which means including taxonomies and ontologies as well as other newer solutions.

So what is needed in a folksonomy? It must be broad to provide the best results. People must be tagging content or objects for their own purposes. The tags must be separated from the object so they are a point of reference. The person tagging must also be distinguishable from the objects to they are a point of reference. The objects must provide a point of aggregation to find common tags and common people and the matches on these three points. Tools like del.icio.us and CiteULike.com do this very well.

When we have these distinct elements we can begin filtering and aggregating, just as Jon Udell has been doing in his collaborative filtering.

Tagging Article at OK/Cancel

OK/Cancel posted a quick article on tagging I pulled wrote (mostly pulled out of e-mail responses). The article is Tagging for Fun and Finding, which includes mention of folksonomy.

Heading to Los Angeles and SSAW at the Annenberg Center

I am off again this weekend. I will be in Los Angeles this weekend. So far I have most of Friday free. It looks like dinner may be taken on Friday evening as well as a beer or two to acclimate a Brit. Interesting things to see (other than my old house, junior high, and neighborhood) or meet-ups would be quite welcome.

I am at the Social Software in the Academy Workshop at the USC Annenberg Center on Saturday and Sunday. I will be chatting with Richard Cameron of CiteULike on Sunday. Not only does he run CiteULike, but he has been doing some interesting research on trends and patterns, which he is using to improve the probability the person using the service will find what they need more easily. We had a great chat last night and I am really looking forward to the public chat on Sunday.

Opening Old Zips and Finding Missing Passion

Tonight I finally got my old USB Zip drive to work with my laptop (I have not tried in a couple years) and it worked like a charm. I decided to pull most of the contents of my old Zips into my hard drive, as it is backed-up.

I started opening old documents from a project from four and five years ago and the documentation is so much better and detailed that what I have these days. The difference? Focus and resources. On that project I was researching, defining, iterating, and testing one project full-time. I was working with some fantastic developers that were building their parts and a designer that could pulled everything together visually. We each had our areas of expertise and were allowed to do what we enjoyed and excelled at to the fullest. Our passions could just flow. The project was torn apart by budgets and politics with the real meat of it never going live. A small piece of it went live, but nothing like we had up and running. But, this is the story of so many killer projects and such is life.

What is different between now and then? Today there is no focus and no resources to develop and design. I am in an environment overseeing 2,000 projects a year across 15 funding areas (most of the work done centrally is done on 5 funding areas), it is project traffic management, not design, not research design, not iterating, just balancing high priority projects (mostly it is 9 of us cleaning up others poor work). The team I work with is fantastic, but we have few resources (mostly time is missing) to do incredible work.

The looking back at the volumes of documents I wrote laying out steps, outlines of design elements, content assessments, schematics, data flows, wireframes, and Flash animations demonstrating how the finished tools would function I realize I miss that, deeply. I miss the passion and drive to make something great. I miss being permitted to dream big and solve problems that were untouchable, and best of all, go execute on those dreams. When I see members that made up that old team we reminisce, much like guys do about high school sports champion teams they were on. We had a great team with each of us doing what we loved and changing our part of the world, the digital world.

It was in that project that the seeds were planted for everything I love working on now. Looking at old diagrams I see hints of the Model of Attraction. I was using scenarios around people using and reusing information, which became the Personal InfoCloud. These elements were used to let others in on our dreams for that project and it was not until my time on the project was winding down (or there was no desire to move more of the whole product live and therefore no need for my skills) that I could pull out what worked well on project that made it special. Now others are getting to understand the Personal InfoCloud and other frameworks and models I have been sharing.

State is the Web

The use and apparent mis-use of state on the web has bugged me for some time, but now that AJAX, or whatever one wants to call "XMLHttpRequests", is opening the door to non-Flash developers to ignore state. The latest Adaptive Path essay, It's A Whole New Internet, quotes Michael Buffington, "The idea of the webpage itself is nearing its useful end. With the way Ajax allows you to build nearly stateless applications that happen to be web accessible, everything changes." And states, "Where will our bookmarks go when the idea of the 'webpage' becomes obsolete?"

I agree with much of the article, but these statements are wholly naive in my perspective. Not are they naive, but they hold up examples of the web going in the wrong direction. Yes, the web has the ability to build application that are more seemless thanks to the that vast majority of people using web browsers that can support these dynamic HTML techniques (the techniques are nothing new, in fact on intranets many of us were employing them four or five years ago in single browser environments).

That is not the web for many, as the web has been moving toward adding more granular information chunks that can be served up and are addressible. RESTful interfaces and "share this page" links are solutions. The better developers in the Flash community has been working to build state into their Flash presentations to people can link to information that is important, rather than instructing others to click through a series of buttons or wait through a few movies to get to desired/needed information. The day of one stateless interface for all information was behind us, I hope to hell it is not enticing a whole new generation of web developers to lack understanding of state.

Who are providing best examples? Flickr and Google Maps are two that jump to mind. Flickr does one of the best jobs with fluid interfaces, while keeping links to state that is important (the object that the information surrounds, in this case a photograph). Google Maps are stunning in their fluidity, but during the whole of one's zooming and scrolling to new locations the URL remains the same. Google Map's solution is to provide a "Link to this page" hyperlink (in my opinion needs to be brought to the visual forefront a little better as I have problems getting people to recognize the link when they have sent me a link to maps.google.com rather than their intended page).

Current examples of a poor grasp of state is found on the DUX 2005 conference site. Every page has the same URL, from the home page, to submission page, to about page. You can not bookmark the information that is important to yourself, nor can you send a link to the page your friend is having problems locating. The site is stateless in all of its failing glory. The designer is most likely not clueless, just thoughtless. They have left out the person using the site (not users, as I am sure their friends whom looked at the design thought it was cool and brilliant). We have to design with people using and resusing our site's information in mind. This requires state.

When is State Helpful?

If you have important information that the people using your site may want to directly link to, state is important as these people will need a URL. If you have large datasets that change over time and you have people using the data for research and reports, the data must have state (in this case it is the state of the data at some point in time). Data that change that does not have state will only be use for people that enjoy being selected as a fool. Results over time will change and all good academic research or professional researchers note the state of the data with time and date. All recommendations made on the data are only wholly relevant to that state of the data.

Nearly all blogging tools have "permalinks", or links that link directly to an unchanging URL for distinct articles or postings, built into the default settings. These permalinks are the state function, as the main page of a blog is fluid and ever changing. The individual posts are the usual granular elements that have value to those linking to them (some sites provide links down to the paragraph level, which is even more helpful for holding a conversation with one's readers).

State is important for distinct chunks of information found on a site. Actions do not seem state-worthy for things like uploading files, "loading screens", select your location screens (the pages prior and following should have state relative to the locations being shown on those pages), etc.

The back button should be a guide to state. If the back button takes the user to the same page they left, that page should be addressable. If the back button does not provide the same information, it most likely should present the same information if the person using the site is clicking on "next" or "previous". When filling out an application one should be able to save the state of the application progress and get a means to come back to that state of progress, as people are often extremely aggravated when filling out longs forms and have to get information that is not in reach, only to find the application times out while they are gone and they have to start at step one after being many steps into the process.

State requires a lot of thought and consideration. If we are going to build the web for amateurization or personal information architectures that ease how people build and structure their use of the web, we must provide state.

Annotated New York Times

The Annotated New York Times is the best interface for blog coverage out there. Feedster and Technorati are leagues behind in their presentation compared to this. I had not been to BlogRunner in a while, but it has grow-up too. The interface, interaction, and presentation are dead-on for an intuitive tool. Bravo.

I do wish it were easier to find book review annotations more easily, such as by author or book title.

Folksonomy In Wired Magazine

Today was largely an exceptional day. I got a few nice e-mails today that really made my day (more on those some other time). But, today when I got home and settled Andrew popped up on iChat saying he had just opened the April issue of Wired and read the Bruce Sterling article. ["Order Out of Chaos"], about... me. My copy was on the steps and I had not really looked at the mail yet. Andrew pointed me to page 83, to which I had a jaw dropping holy expletive.

I have been getting interviewed a far amount this year and the novelty of seeing one's own name in print has not worn off. But, seeing my own name in Wired magazine, particularly in a Bruce Sterling article, as a little mind numbing. His fact checker had contacted me a few weeks back, but I was not expecting this.

The best thing about the article was Bruce nails folksonomy. But, he not only nails it he provides a couple explanations that stand out:

It was a mob of interested people - folks and the machines working behind the scenes that tossed in some technological onomy. .... Folksonomy emerges from a combination of two inventions: (1) machines that can automate at least some of what it takes to classify information and (b) social software that makes users willing to do at least some of the work for nothing.

It is well worth the read to get a good grasp of where folksonomies work and where they are lacking. Bruce does an excellent job pulling all of the ends together. Now I really wish I could have stayed one more and two more nights at SXSWi just to say hello to Bruce and be prescient enough to thank him in advance.

SXSW and Solipsism Presentation

I am having a great time at SXSW Interactive. I am heading back home this evening and will truly miss the remainder of the festival (it truly is a celebration of the web and digital design).

Yesterday I spoke on the panel, How to Leverage Solopsism. My slides for the session focussing on Personal Information Management (1.14MB PDF) is available.

I have has so many wonderful conversations. Please keep in touch and lets keep the conversations going.

IA for the Personal InfoCloud

At the IA Summit 2005 (Montreal) I spoke on IA for the Personal InfoCloud, which seemed to go over quite well. The presentation of the slides of IA for the Personal InfoCloud (2.64MB PDF) can be downloaded. The time to present this was rather short, but I added a scenario to walk through a possible scenario that runs across environments (work, mobile, and home) with two contexts for each.

There is a lot I still have not presented on this that makes it more usable today in many environments. It is particularly helpful if you are designing across devices, building for personal management of the information, and/or designing for information use and reuse. If anybody would like me to present the full presentation and help them understand this better, please contact me (e-mail is above or use vanderwal on the gmail.com address).

I was asked about the cloud a few times. The Personal InfoCloud is the rough cloud of information that follows us as we go from place to place, this cloud keeps all the information the person wants to be kept nearby.

Dan Willis offered, not only great advice on my visuals, but replacement visuals. I will work to use these excellent replacements in the coming presentations.

Folksonomy: A Wrapper's Delight

As part of the IA Summit 2005 (Montreal) panel on Social Classification (Folksonomies) I presented Folksonomy: A Wrapper's Delight (2.6MB PDF), which refers to the ability to wrap from an emergent vocabulary to a formal controlled vocabulary using a folksonomy. In the discussion I brought up "the flood of information on the internet has turned the scent of information into the stench of information, but folksonomies and other tools help bring back the sweet smell of information". We get the sweet smell from ease of refindability.

Brief Summit Snippet and the Week Ahead

A quick note: I just got back from the IA Summit in Montreal and I am a little burnt from wonderful stimulation. I utter loved this Summit, but I consumed it differently than the previous three I have been to. I did not make it to nearly half, three-quarters of the things I had hoped to, mostly because I was involved in wonderful conversations around the stuff I am deeply passionate about.

I found others working on similar areas of thought. Gene Smith (whom I am indebted to or cursed by for unleashing the Folksonomy virus) and Brett Lider presented sessions back to back that made me realize there is a disparate conversation going on at the moment and we need a little place to pull ideas together. This place will hopefully be the IA 2.0 Salon at the moment it is going to be an invite only kind of thing to keep it relatively small, but open to those that are passionate and have knowledge and information to contribute. The focus is on person-centered information architecture, rich information architecture, personal inforcloud, designing for information use and reuse, designing across context and environments, designing across devices, etc.

I have another presentation tomorrow and then a panel at SXSW Interactive. Please come say hello.

I feel like I really did not get to spend enough time with everybody I wished to at the IA Summit. I was also having a tough time placing people with context, whom I know through their digital representations in their blogs or e-mail addresses on listserves. Please drop me a note at the address in my contact above or my screen name at gmail.com to say hello and continue the conversations.

I really wish I was going to Emerging Technology as well, as there will be a great amount of conversation around more of the same areas. I have been asked by many if I was going and had many people tell me I really need to be there this year. As of today I am not going as I was not asked and with all the things going on these days I need a stronger reason that to go and just hang. I take vacation to go and speak as well as pay out of my own pocket when I am not paid to speak. Unless things change in the next few days I am going to hope the conversations through e-mail will suffice.

Jef Raskin has Passed Away

In sadness and condolence to his family, Jef Raskin passed away. Jef was an inspiration to nearly every designer and developer, by helping us to aim to make products that were intuitive and extremely useful. It is my hope that is vision lives on in the lives and minds of all those he inspired and still inspires.

Peace.

All the Blog that is Fit To...

From the blog realm. Elise Bauer provides an excellent overview of available blog tools. This is a very good article on the business of weblog tool development and what the tools offer.

The fine folks at Six Apart launched their redesign today. Not only is there a new look, but the navigation is improved and is now consistent. All of the Six Apart properties are now united, which is also very helpful. Their site is looking less like a blog and more like a professional software company, but the secret it is their sites are run by their blogging tools. Great job 6A and Mule who did much of the work!

Informal Coffee Convene

Dan captured yesterday morning's coffee convene very well. I just happened to look up and see two friends and fellow IAs having a discussion. It was a great way to start my weekend. This could be a great regular weekend jump off. It is good to sit and talk constructively and critically of our own work, it really helps. Maybe next time I will bring my own work to offer up for sacrifice.

This really sparked my juices to keep plugging along on my pet projects, which are getting more non-pet every day, meaning they are growing into real work and beyond the hours of my spare time. My passion for the projects has been growing over the four years I have been working on them.

It is Speaking Season

The next month or so has a few speaking engagements lined up. They are as follows:

Date: February 17th 2005 - Thursday (9am to 11:30am)
Event: The Web Mangers Roundtable
Topic: Blogging into 2005 panel (with Mike Lee of AARP and Lee Rainey of PEW Foundation
Location: Washington, DC, USA
Access: Sold Out

Date: March 5th 2005 - Saturday (10:30am - 12:15pm)
Event: ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit
Topic: Sorting Out Classification - with Stewart Butterfield, Peter Merholz, Peter Morville, and Gene Smith
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Access: IA Summit Registration

Date: March 5th 2005 - Saturday (4pm to 4:45pm)
Event: ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit
Topic: IA for the Personal InfoCloud
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Access: IA Summit Registration

Date: March 9th 2005 - 6:30pm
Event: ASIS&T Potomac Valley Chapter Panel
Topic: From Soup to Nuts: Blogs, Blogging, and the Greater Impacts to Information Science -p with James Melzer of SRA International and Christina Pikas of Johns Hopkins University
Location: Laurel, MD, USA: Campus of Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory
Access: Registration Form

Date: March 14th (?), 2005 (Specifics to follow)
Event: South by Southwest Interactive Festival
Topic: How to Leverage Solipsism - with Peter Merholz and Stewart Butterfield
Location: Austin, TX, USA
Access: SXSW Interactive Registration