No TagsSome time ago, I wrote an article describing my views on the commerical (but yet free of charge) services that provide social bookmarking services. Having done some further research during the past week or so, I realized that there are a few goo…

I have Pigeon Hole bundle that has writeaboutme, readme, tryme etc

I also use it to share information and auto-generate material for our podcast at radiosttic.am.

As far as searching it goes, I agree but…

Try using several diffent tags and some + signs. The results are still not great but better. I think the network feature of it is of far more benefit

I recently discovered A Social Life, a most excellent blog that is focused, so far, on enterprise tagging (aka internal tagging / bookmarking…), a subject that is *very* close to my heart right now. Steve Eisner, the blog author is VP of Engineer…

I recently discovered A Social Life, a most excellent blog that is focused, so far, on enterprise tagging (aka internal tagging / bookmarking…), a subject that is *very* close to my heart right now. Steve Eisner, the blog author is VP of Engineer…

Rather than trying to map every one of your tags to everyone else’s, we’re mapping from multiple local vocabularies to a single global vocabulary.

If the set of all item you’ve tagged with a particular tag can be called a “bundle” of items, then what we’re doing is relating bundles to other bundles by way of a public reference tag. I make the distinction “bundles” vs. “tags” because bundles are a superset of tags - you could, for instance, talk about a bundle of things that have been tagged with “foo” *and* “bar”, whereas a tag is just “foo”.

As mentioned in my “terminology” post, we use “folders” instead of tags at the personal level, and “channels” as the public version. Without context these might seem like strange terms but it has to do with the way they’re exposed to the user.

Anyway, our mapping is only {user,folder}->{channel}. You can probably see how if {user1,foo}->{channel} and {user2,bar}->{channel}, then user1 and user2 might be recommended each others’ tags. But that’s not the primary purpose, and there are also lots of other ways to generate recommendations.

At the simplest reduction this is equivalent to del.icio.us, but it’s capable of a lot more, like your searchchampsv4 example. Of course, it all comes down to a) can it be presented in a way that makes sense to users, and b) can the more complex scenarios be enabled with reasonable performance? I’m going to be talking more about this in future posts, I hope you’ll keep reading and commenting! Thanks…

If I tag a resource “foo” there needs to be at least one other person that tags it “foo” as well before the network can draw a conclusion that everyone else tagged the resource “bar” so for me (and the other person) “foo == bar”. This would be a much easier problem to solve (in an automated way) if you could only assign a resource a single tag but given the fact you can assign resources multiple tags this sounds like a really hard problem to me. You would actually need a bunch of people tagging it “foo” but not “bar” and a bunch of other people tagging it “bar” but not “foo” for “foo” & “bar” to rise up out of the noise as an association…

David - curious to see some examples of how you handle the differences in noun vs. adverb tagging. I’ll keep an eye on your blog and follow your progress!

Steve - That sounds like a great way to leverage existing search functionality… In the case where terms are fairly authoritative and/or unique, it would probably work well. But it does come with some downsides. Part of the mapping I’m talking about is its handling of personal vocabularies - when I tag with “enterprise” it means something different than another user’s use of the same term. We couldn’t insert a global equivalence using “enterprise” because both of us would start seeing some garbage search results. This implies that there’s something other than just global equivalence going on. If it’s possible to express the whole set of {user,tag}-to-{public term} relationship via per-user search dictionaries, then maybe it’s more like what I’m talking about?
In any case it would be really interesting to see just how much can be expressed purely by a global dictionary. The 2nd rawsugar link I posted contains a list of potentially-equivalent terms, to start…

I also wonder if this wouldn’t be a way of dealing with tag localization. For instance would I want to find English authored “searchchampsv4″ content when I expressed the French version of that tag?

-Steve

We also find that ‘nouns’ tags match up pretty well, or can be directly aliases, while adverbs are much harder to do, or rather more ambiguous. It is also the case that our users so far have wanted the ‘adverb’ tags to remain more private, as in they tag the content but don’t always want it to ‘travel’.

I realize this a little cryptic and will try to write up what we are observing soon. It’s a really fascinating area.

- David

Since posting the Del.icio.us Inside and Tagging behind-the-firewall posts, I’ve been pinged left right…

Thanks for your article on tag-based classification. Want to let you know that I put these ideas to life at http://talkinghub.com/ which I welcome you to take a look and leave some comments.

Denis Krukovsky
http://talkinghub.com/

I actually find tags to be pretty useful - but not for refindability. Rather, they help me divide my own space up. But I’m getting ahead of myself since that’s the topic of my next post!

And /you’re/ getting way ahead of myself with comments about “similar pages” functionality! That’s one of the points where my series of posts is leading

Like you, I believe that browser bookmarks are a better way to do “bookmarking”, and search is a better way to re-find. Anyone who is attempting to convert the average enterprise user to share their bookmarks for the individual benefit alone will be facing an uphill climb (or a stiff neck, to use your metaphor.)

But I do believe that there are ways to benefit users with social bookmarking, or we wouldn’t have a product in the arena In this series of posts I’m trying to distill the best ways to provide individual value - benefits that won’t require forcing users to do something they don’t want to do. Hope you’ll follow along and continue to provide your two centses!

eLearning Technology: Yahoo MyWeb better than del.icio.us, rollyo, et.al. for Personal / Group Learning

Like you I find tags to be of marginal value - but it helps with search.

What I would really like to find is a better “similar pages” function which is essentially what you are getting via tags in an ad hoc manner.

I know there is a feature for creating Collections, which I think resembles folders. If you remember in what collection you placed your site, Bingo!, but what if you don’t? You have to go to every folder and look for your missing site. Another pain in the neck. Now your neck is really stiff.

I prefer Firefox’s Bookmarks and the way it manages them. I use the search feature and the saved site is right there. Click on it and Voila, the site is there before you on the screen.

What I like about del.icio.us is that I can share my saved sites with my different browsers. I normally use Firefox, Flock, Opera and Netscape. If I save my sites in My del.icio.us page, it doesn’t matter what browser I’m using, I can always access my sites. I can’t do that with traditional bookmarks. The same holds true for work and home bookmarks.

Just my two cents worth regarding your post

Regards,

Omar.-.

But I didn’t mean to imply that 90% of the target audience are “non-users” getting no value from the app! That first “10:1″ ratio of non-users/users can be improved by a lot of things:
- something like the “Perceived Usefulness” concept you blogged about
- the maturity of the site, ie. amount of existing good content
- number of times potential users are reminded of the app
- mandated visits, ie. strong management by app sponsors
- good integration into daily apps
Our enterprise app sees much higher adoption within audiences because we do all of these things. Note that the example in the Yahoo article starts at the “consumer” (ie. already a user) and I guess that’s the real parallel to our observed stats.

Both our internet product and current enterprise product, initially focused on knowledge-sharing via Q&A, had very discrete steps to change from a “reader” to an “asker” to an “answerer”/”expert”. That’s the strongest comparison to the yahoo pyramid.

I think the “10:1″ ratio (which may just be a coincidence) mainly applies where users have to do real work to undertake the next step of engagement, to use the term from Ross’s article. So 10:1’s can be reduced by:
- negating a step, for instance “signing up for an account” becomes a non-issue with enterprise applications, where we always implement single sign-on
- introducing an easier intermediate step
- realizing that your audience is trying to use your app differently than you intended, and adding features to support that behavior
- etc.
But you’re still up against self-selection of roles; at some point you can’t force someone to become a “Writer” if he’s just not interested (or can you? a topic of a later post…)
I don’t have detailed stats from other apps, but clearly e-mail pretty much reaches 100% audience participation, so it’s not some sort of a participation “Law” I guess the goal of any app should be to tackle perceived & unmet needs as well as e-mail has fulfilled our general communication needs?

Anyway, in the end I think it takes a combination of Ross’s engagement chart and bradley’s magnified-effect chart to really document the value being produced by the community… For me the takeaway wasn’t so much that there are users missing out on value, but that a small number of highly engaged users can provide enough value for a large number of more passive users. This is the same thing we show customers - you might not see as much new content as you expected but take a look at the viewing/searching stats (or better yet, poll your users) and you’ll be surprised!

Do you find that this ratio holds pretty steady in other applications? What’s the answer to when your potential customers ask about the other 90%?