I'm at [well, I was yesterday when I wrote this] a session at Harvard's Lamoint Library (one of the 90+ libraries here) about Web 2.0 and social tagging. I just gave a 20 minute opener on why tagging matters.

Michael Hemment, the host, begins by showing tag clouds from 50 students who were asked to tag some particular resources. The group quickly guesses that the first tag cloud refers to the libraries, the next is Google, and the next is Jon Stewart. Very amusing,

Michael talks about why slocial tagging matters to libraries. He mentions some initiatives, including PennTags , Stanford IC, and the Steve Museum. Harvard has the CRT (Collaborative Research Tool) and EdTags initiatives. He also mentions iCommons (exploring iSites metadata and tagging) and ARTStor .

He takes a closer look at LibraryThing.com, showing how easy it is to enter titles, organize them, tag them, and get suggestions.

PennTags was created by the U Penn library to enable university members to tag books. (The site is open to anyone, but only U Penn members can add tags.) It begins with a tag cloud of tags used at least 58 times, Users can also create folders to organize bookmarks into projects. [I blogged about it here.]

The Stanford Library Information Center combines tags, blogs and wikis. It includes tagging by librarians who organize resources in a somewhat more orderly way.

Harvard could, Michael says, enable tagging of the libraries' resources, and the Lib-X tool (a browser add-in that gives you access to Harvard's onloine resources) could be used to tag sites, adding to what Harvard knows.

Carla Lillvik, Research and Distance Services Librarian at the Gutman Library of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, looks at "social tagging and bibliographic management." She says you want not only to find resources and organize them, but also to cite them.

She uses as her example the site Five Weeks to a Social Library. She adds it to her page at Connotea and tags it. She could also post it to EdTags.org. But what about resources she finds in research databases, e.g. EBSCO Host? She could add it to Connotea, even though the URL doesn't look persistent. But Connotea doesn't pick up any of the bibliographic info from the database. (Connotea has agreements with a long list of such systems, including BioMed Central, PLoS, Nature.com, and arXiv.org, but not with all of them.) She can instead make a folder in EBSCO, which does indeed pick up all the info. [Sounds like we need a standard API for university e-research systems.] Harvard's RefWorks has the advantage, Carla says, of enabling batch tagging [LibraryThing does too] and enables output in a variety of bibliographic styles [yay!] RefWorks folders can be shared, even with people who don't have an account; they can be shared as an RSS feed, too. (RefWorks works with Google Scholar — you can set a preference so that results can be imported into RefWorks.)

Michael Hemment presents Prof. Dan Smail's Collaborative Research Tool (CRT), a social tagging tool that works within Harvard's e-environment. In Smail's course on Medieval Europe (History 1122) , students are put onto teams (e.g., "France, Germany and italy") and are assigned sources. They create virtual note cards that are tagged, annotated and entered nto a database. Class discussions, lectures, and final papers are based on these cards.

The cards tend to include the passage, comment, related links, and tags. It's easy to navigate by tag.

Pedagogical implications, according to Michael: Students have to reflect on their tagging schemes. [meta learning] They cards "form the basis of complex intertextual discourse on a broad range of medieval topics." E.g., you could see how Ulysses appears through multiple literatures. Also, tagging develops a personal relationship to the source material.

[Excellent. But we still need a way to write a document based on cards, so that adding info from the card automatically creates the right footnote and bibliographic entry in the document, and notes where the card has been used. I blogged about this here.]

Adam Seldow, a grad student at the Harvard School of Education, works on EDTags.org. It's a social network to connect people who share interests in education. It's open to anyone. You can tag a site, vote on bookmarks, email them, blog them, or find related blog postings. You can upload your papers, photos, presentations, etc.

Q: How does tagging fit with scholarly resource? Is there a way to cite where and how a resource is tagged?
A: (Michael) Not in the major tagging sites, e.g., del.icio.us. The lack of rules has been one of the advantages of these sites.The noise introduced can often be negated at least in part by the good rising to the top.

Q: How about privacy?
A: (Adam) EdTags lets you set the level of privacy. And it's an actively managed site.

Q: What types of resources does EdTags tag?
A: (Adam) Mainly "gray literature" — blog posts, preprints, Web sites, course-generated papers.

Q: (me) What do we do about the fragmentation of the tagging space? I can tag in del.icio.us, Connotea, EdTags...
A: (Adam) A condition when we built EdTags was that it has to be able to talk wth del.icio.us or export to an XML file. Personally, I use different tagging sites for different types of research.

Q: What are the patterns of use at EdTags?
A: EdTags has been live for a little over a year. (It started as TeacherShare.) First year doctoral students, who were trained on it, use it. It's being used in some specific courses and teacher education programs, plus a community of faculty members interested in emerging trends in education technology. The person who uploads the most bookmarks is a woman from Slovenia. There are about 400 users. About 100,000 hits/month.

Q: Did you build it from scratch?
A: It's a mashup of Scuttle, an open source platform, with lots of custom work.

Q: HW and SW behind it? How did you finance it?
A: (Adam) A Harvard Provost Innovation Grant financed it.

Q: How to encourage the use of social tagging at a library?
A: (Michael) I don't know that we want to encourage it. We're exploring. [Tags: libraries tagging social_networks everything_is_miscellaneous folksonomy]

Terry Heaton and Steve Safran discuss the news that MySpace is getting into the news biz. Fascinating. This could be a big way we put front pages together for one another (where front page = feed, aggregator, outcome of any recommendation engine, or a vague handwave in a particular direction).

Today for me basically consists of a few hours at home between planes, but I did have a chance to poke at the USA Today networked journalism foray. It's definitely getting there, although only having "thumbs up" buttons for articles, and no "thumbs down," I suspect will doom that feature to irrelevance. But, we'll see. And they can always add opposed thumbs if they want to. [Tags: media msn news journalism myspace everythin everything_is_miscellaneous terry_heaton]

I have a brief post at EverythingIsMiscellaneous.com about Many Eyes (a visualization site) and Yahoo Pipes (a feed aggregator)... [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous visualization feeds rss mashups news]

EngineeringVillage.org has about 32 million records available, including 10.7 million from the Compendex (Computerized Engineering Index) that has data going back to 1884, 9.5 million records from the Inspec Archives that goes back to 1896, 2.2 milllion government technical records in the NTIS collection, and 9.5 million patent abstracts.

How can you possibly navigate 32 million records? Searching requires second-guessing authors, and with that many records, it’s bound to miss more than it finds. So, EV uses a combination of full text searching and faceted navigation.

For example, if you’re looking for anti-gravity devices, begin by doing a text search on “gravity.” You’ll get 202,162 results. In the righthand frame, you are shown eight areas (facets) — source, author, affiliation, country, document type, year, etc. — each with a list of the occupants of that particular branch. So, under Affiliation, you can see that the Jet Propulsion Lab has 326 records that contain the word “gravity,” while NASA’s Goddard Center only has 155; this by itself is valuable information. Check the NASA box, and now you you can further refine the 234 results by deciding only to see those articles published in the US, and then the ones on solid state physics. We’re now down to 11 articles. But we can always go back and remove the restriction to only articles published by NASA. It’s tree browsing where we get to construct the tree.

Now EngineeringVillage has added user-created tags. Tags can be declared as public, institutional, or belonging to a user-defined group. Very cool. (It would be especially helpful if, say, the US Patent Office were to suck in the tags applied to patents.)

The tag cloud shows that the top tags at the moment — early days for the tagging feature — are “Thermal management,” “sathya,” “Unsaturated soils,” “Wireless sensor networks,” “Photonic crystals,” and “Room temperature,” which suggests that users are working on growing photonic crystals at room temperature for use in wireless sensor networks, to enable the Sathya Sai Organization at long last to achieve world domination.

In an email, Rafael Sidi, VP of product engineering at Elsevier Engineering Information says that the faceted system was built in house using the FAST search engine.

BTW, I think Rafael makes the right response to Steve Rubel’s idea that “It’s very difficult to survive as a paid service in a Long Tail environment. One reason is that it’s now easier to discover free, open source alternatives.” Rafael replies that services like EngineeringVillage add “value to the content that we publish (indexing, writing abstracts), creating better searching features and providing analytical tools (intelligence).” The Long Tail enables the creation of such deep value that only some of that value can be addressed by Open Source solutions (long may they wave).

(Disclosure: Steve Rubel works for Edelman PR, to whom I consult, and I recently did some videoblogging for FastSearch.)

[Tags: faceted_classification search tagging folksonomy patents everything_is_miscellaneous long_tail ]

Tim Spalding has a terrific post analyzing why his LibraryThing has ten times the number of book tags as Amazon. [Tags: amazon librarything libraries tags tagging everything_is_miscellaneous folksonomy]

Scouta lets you bookmark and recommend videos at sites like YouTube, helping you find people with the same interests. It also lets you create groups and share what you've found with them. It has a "karma and kudos" system that notices when you recommend and share stuff. I've been using it in alpha (Disclosure: I'm some type of unoffical advisor, I think) with my family and the Berkman Center as groups. It's useful despite some rough edges. I like and trust the guys who built it. [Tags: scouta media everything_is_miscellaneous videos youtube]

I’ve just added a string of icons at the bottom of every post that will (generally) post the post to a social bookmarking site. So, if you want to save the post’s Web address into your account at, say, del.icio.us, you’d just click on the del.icio.us icon at the bottom of the post.

I totally stole this from Content to Be Different. Thanks!

To adapt it to WordPress, the software this blog uses, you edit the Main Index Template in Presentation Theme editor. To put in a button that links to blinkbits, you’d add something like this:

<a href=”http://www.blinkbits.com/bookmarklets/save.php?v=1&source_url=<?php the_permalink()?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>&body=< ?php the_title(); ?>” title=”blinkbits”><img src=”http://www.yourblogsite.com/wp-content/blinkbits.png” alt=”blinkbits” />

The <?php the_permalink()?> tells WordPress to substitute the permalink of that particular post and the < ?php the_title(); ?> tells it to put in the post’s title. And, of course you’ll have to change the URL of the image file that you’re linking to.

Let the debugging begin! :)

We can already tag videos, of course. But how about being able to tag the good parts?

YourView lets users mark segments on a video using a set of icons, and also indicate the "intensity" of each. In their example, a user could tag all the serves in a tennis match, and then watch all the high-intensity ones, or could watch all the non-boring parts of a cricket match, reducing a 44 hour match to 4 seconds and the credits. More to YourView's point, the broadcaster of the video could mark it up with icons.

This isn't exactly tagging because the user only has access to a pre-determined set of icons (and it's not clear from the site who determines the set). It's also not clear whether user-based markings are public and social; I'm assuming not. So, you don't get the social effects of tagging, e.g., find the segments of a video the most people have marked "great shot" or find all segments of all videos anyone has marked "whoops."

It requires the use of the YourView viewer. Enable any user to do this outside of the YourView viewer, and you'd really have something. (I'm not saying it'd be easy.)

MotionBox.com has a related function that lets you select any portion of a video and tag it—real tags—with any words you want. It seems that only the person who posts the video can tag selections, though. And you have to view the video on the MotionBox site.

Still, we're getting closer... [Tags: video motionbox yourview tagging folksonomy everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Technorati.com is a search site that indexes blogs - Google for blogs, as I’m sure Technorati doesn’t like it put. It also lets you embed a chart of how frequently a word is mentioned on blogs over time. This one charts the occurence of tags, tagging and folksonomy:

Posts that contain Tags Tagging Folksonomy per day for the last 30 days.

Click here to get your own chart.

(Disclosure: I’m on Technorati’s advisory board.)

When I posted yesterday about my problem with Thunderbird and its possible solution, I did so in part because I wanted to make it findable by others with the same problem. So, I did the most basic search-engine optimization stuff of making sure I used some words and tags people are likely to search for. Then, yesterday afternoon I was part of a brief conversation with Andy Oram in which he talked about his interest in the phenomenon of bottom-up tech support. Googling for solutions to problems works but only sort of, says Andy. And that got me thinking that it'd be useful if we started tagging such posts with some standard tags, such as (perhaps): troubleshooting, operating system, application name, error message, problem area, solved/unsolved. So, my post on Thunderbird would be tagged: troubleshooting, xp, thunderbird, "rebuilding index", folders, solved. Something like that.

In fact, perhaps we could use a microformat for technical problems and solutions. [Tags: microformats troubleshooting andy_oram everything_is_miscellaneous]