Answer: the User Interface 10 Conference, whose web site I just helped produce:

Cool features of the conference:

1. One word: iPod
2. You can learn great stuff from cool people and excellent speakers like the unequalled Molly & Eric
3. You can see proof that I do actually have a day job, and that I’m not an independently wealthy freelance designer with no contracts (like some of you seem to believe)

Before you go check it out, let me make a disclaimer to all those code jockeys out there…just don’t look at the code: it is in a functional state only, not a presentable one. You’ve been warned.

User Interface 10 Sneak Preview

Sometimes all we need is a little confidence booster. When we’re down, feeling a little like we’re heading down the wrong path despite our gut feeling, we need someone or something to remind us just what the hell it is we’re doing and why we’re doing it. In other words, we need to glimpse the forest through the trees.

That came, for me, this morning, in the form of a blog post by Adam Bosworth. I’ve been following his blog ever since I listened to the January 14th Gillmor Gang podcast with him as guest. Bosworth is Google’s VP of Engineering, and is one of those folks who is very well-known within his community but hardly-known outside of it. Anyway, his schtick is databases: the man is a database guru.

But it wasn’t Bosworth’s credentials that impressed me. It was his way of explaining things. He talks about things in an interesting, very straightforward way. For example, this is an excerpt of the blog post that I read this morning, where Bosworth tidily explains the nature of communication as it now appears on the Web:

“Then the promise should be that anyone can connect to any information or application or anyone else and that any application can connect to anyone or any application or any information. We got anyone to anyone early in the form of email and more recently in the form of IM and of Blogs. IM adds real time communication and presence and Blogs add broadcasting to the world along with a dialog with the world. We got anyone to any application from the esteemed Tim Berners Lee in the form of HTML, HTTP, and URL’s which changed our world. I say applications because there wasn’t any standard way to ask for information. We got, unfortunately, any application talking to anyone (we call this spam). Web services in one form or another are letting applications access other application although, as I’ve said elsewhere, I think that the standards are too prolix and that a lot of the action will come out of REST and RSS.”

But that wasn’t the most exciting part. The exciting part was his views on folksonomies, which he had heard a ton about at two recent conferences: ETech and PCForum. This is a sliver of what he had to say about folksonomies:

“And the web is now rapidly becoming the place for people to collaborate. Wiki’s are growing like wildfire. Folksonomies(tagging) are causing people to quickly and in an emergent bottoms up way, come together to build taxonomies that work for them and surprisingly rapidly become stable…”

Read the entire, most interesting post here. If you’ve been reading my stuff for more than a couple weeks, you’ll notice that Bosworth echoes some of my thoughts on folksonomies and taxonomies: namely, my suspicion of top-down taxonomies and my belief in people to classify their own stuff how they see fit.

And now you might be saying: But why are you excited by this? Well, I’m excited by this because I truly believe that we’re figuring out how to build a democratic world, here: the tools of democracy.

Bosworth’s bullishness on folksonomies, wikis, and collaboration in particular and his optimism in general gave me confidence that my recent musings on folksonomies have not been all-for-nought. Surely, us pro-folks people are optimistic about emergent…well, emergent everything…but it sure is nice to know that this big thinker is digging this stuff, too.

On other fronts, Bud Gibson has more on his xFolk microformat that I pointed to yesterday.

Also, for those del.icio.us users out there, check out Del.icio.us Linkbacks.

Happy Spring!

Danny Sullivan over at SearchEngineWatch.com is skeptical of the benefits of tagging. After all, he points out, we’ve had the meta keywords element in HTML for years and most Search Engines started ignoring it after so many people abused it. He sees tags as no different, suggesting that they’ll be abused before long.

I agree with this to some extent. I remember when I first heard of tagging, I wanted to know, “how is that different than meta tags?”. I think we’ll see in the coming months…and we’ll also see some interesting things on the kind-of-related “microformat” front. Microformats are basically an “extension” of XHTML that leverages a standard format so that aggregators can understand them (and people thought the semantic web was bunk). For example, Bud Gibson is proposing a new XFolk microformat for folksonomies. Interesting stuff!

Over at Steve Rubel’s Micropersuasion (a blog I’ve been reading recently), there’s a raging debate about Google’s new Autolink feature. In the post Steve suggests that because of Google’s size and apparent willingness to tread on unclear ground (by overwriting or rewriting links within a web page), that there should be serious cause for concern. He doesn’t see it very different than when Microsoft tried a similar thing not too long ago.

This is a tough one. I think the answer will lie somewhere in the middle of the two warring camps. I think that user choice is correct (of course), but I don’t see a tool that rewrites links as the answer. I would OK with a tool that allows users to overwrite say, on a site-to-site basis or even more granular than that, but only with direct user control.

What I’m afraid of is users seeing changed content without realizing it (kind of like users thinking that Windows = computers without realizing that there are many more choices out there). This serves to make all of our content less valuable because users will make associations that just aren’t there: in an extreme case it will serve to dilute our content to the point of no value. So, at the very least, the Google Autolink should be turned off by default…and now I’m just reading this very good overview of the situation at kuro5hin.com which elucidates my argument (and others) more comprehensively than I was going to. Go read that.

Back to Rubel’s site: I was interested to see David Sims takes my notes from yesterday concerning Google and apply them to his argument(scroll down a ways). He even points out that I wasn’t talking about Autolink, but I was talking about where value comes from, and that’s through user choice.

Flipping through the 2nd edition of the Polar Bear book, I found an interesting section that portends the use of bottoms-up, user generated, emergent navigation systems, my latest muse. I did not expect to find such a passage, given Peter Morville’s recent talk on folksonomies at the IASummit, but nonetheless both he and Rosenfeld we able to portend the coming change in navigation systems even a couple years ago.

The passage begins on page 355. Here it is:

The practice of information architecture has come a long way since the early 1990s. We began with highly centralized, top-down approaches, attempting to leverage careful planning into stable solutions. We did some good work, but learned the hard way that change is a constant and surprises should be expected. More recently, we’ve been exploring bottom-up approaches that tap the distributed intelligence within our organizations to nuture emergent, adaptive solutions. The following table compares classic or “top-down” IA to modern or “bottom-up” IA:

Classic IA	Modern IA
Prescriptive	Descriptive
Top-Down	Bottom-Up
Planned	Emergent
Stable	Adaptive
Centralized	Distributed

As we struggle with these ideas, an interesting question arises. Do we create information architectures or reveal them?

So, given that the 2nd edition of the Polar Bear book was published almost 3 years ago, the authors have certainly had time to get used to things like folksonomies coming along and stirring things up. After all, the table displayed above is no less than a great overview of the differences between taxonomies of the classic IA and folksonomies of the modern IA. So, my dear reader, why is Morville still bearish on folksonomies…? Even the wonderful folksonomy video post by Peter Van Dijck doesn’t shed light on this.

Dan Bricklin (co-creator of Visicalc, the first spreadsheet) on the February 4th edition of the Gillmor Gang, quickly talks about how information architecture has changed. He mentions that Google was the big surprise, cutting through the riff-raff in a time when much research was being done on automated taxonomies and hierarchical systems.

Bricklin makes a distinction that I think is hugely important: automation. Automation means “automatically controlled”: to be automated means to have controlling decisions made without conscious or voluntary intervention.

But what about Google, you ask? Isn’t that automated? Surely, people aren’t sitting there deciding which links to give a higher pagerank to, right?

Actually, that’s exactly what’s going on here, but the people in question don’t work for Google. The people in question are the ones making the decisions about what is valuable to them by publicly linking to another URI. (In other words, the people actually making the web sites.) This is the important part of Google, and it is NOT automated. What is automated is the aggregation and display of this behavior. It’s a subtle, but vital, difference.

Also, at the E-Tech summit del.icio.us’ creator Joshua Schacter brings up another important point related to this topic (folksonomies in particular). As quoted in Cory Doctorow’s impressionistic transcript:

“We have different axes of why you’re tagging, what you’re tagging and how it happens. Flickr you mostly tag your stuff for your own purposes, in Technorati, it’s your stuff for others’ purposes, and in Delicious, it’s others’ stuff for your purposes. They’re different things, they don’t necessarily flow together.”

One of the things that this tidbit shows is how different folksonomies can be, even though they’ve been lumped together by those talking about them (including me). Given that, and the growing interest in these things, it seems as though we’re only just beginning to scratch the surface in terms of bottoms-up architectures.

Via Dave Winer: Robert Scoble brings up some interesting points in a post about the new Opera/WASP campaign called the Acid2 test. The test is being proposed as a way to get all browser makers supporting the same standards by having them test their browser against a full-featured web page that contains elements and styling that aren’t supported consistently at the present time.

Scoble, a Microsoft employee, is somewhat upset with WASP for not letting him in on the party beforehand. And given his status as the Microsoft liason of late and his influence around the blogosphere, it does seem odd that nobody talked to him first. He seems to really want to help, and he’s got the ear of the right people in Redmond. That said, the WASP seems like a rather mysterious group.

Another thing: this issue is one of those tough ones where a relatively large company has little incentive to do something other than “it’s the RIGHT thing to do” (it has not been shown what Microsoft would gain from this). I’ve long been frustrated by these sorts of things, and I wonder if publicly challenging them might not be the best thing to do. This reminds me of a recent spat between Joe Clark and Anil Dash about the accessibility of the Movable Type interface. Joe was calling “bullshit” on Six Apart because he had been after them for 6 months to comply with certain accessibility standards, and they hadn’t done what he asked.

I know that sometimes it does help to get the crowd involved, the “media” if you will, but I usually find that there is a disconnect between what the company sees as valuable and what the requesting party sees as valuable. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft is “encouraged” by the ACID2 test.

So I wonder: what is the incentive for Microsoft to change their CSS 2 support? Is the only incentive because WASP wants them to? Or because they don’t want to look bad to developers? Or because WASP wants the media to get involved (as is already happening on Cnet) and then Microsoft would look bad to a lot more people? Also, where is the user in all this? Are they going to see any benefits?

Another tactic might be to directly link what Microsoft really wants (to keep/increase their marketshare) with what goals WASP is selling (standards compliancy). The question is, though, does standards compliancy lead to marketshare? Well, what does the success of Firefox tell us? Was Firefox’s marketshare gain only a security issue, a developer tools issue, or a standards-compliancy issue?

Jon Udell has provided what is perhaps the best example of both the usage and the issues within the del.icio.us bookmarking service. I highly recommend you check this out! Especially if you’re a folksonomy skeptic…

The more I use del.icio.us and observe other folksonomies, the more I realize that we don’t use them to find “stuff”. We use them to discover “personally-related stuff”, which is really hard to do with a search engine. As I mentioned yesterday, Peter Morville’s slides from the IASummit seemed to try to compare two representative services, Google and Flickr, with the implication that folksonomies can’t Search as well as, well, Search can. (Morville compares the services on the axes of “quantity”, “quality”, and “findability”) Anyway, I think he’s absolutely right about that. Search is the best Search…

However, I think that comparing them this way is like comparing a Humvee and a Corvette on gas mileage and speed. It doesn’t really tell us everything. I think he gets the usefulness of folksonomies wrong: we don’t use them to help us Search like we do with Google.

In Search, we have no idea who the results belong to before we get to them. They are simply the most relevant results to whatever words we type in. Highly useful, of course. But not Personal. In folksonomies, on the other hand, we get to discover content based on who is tagging it. This is powerful because now we can judge content in terms of who is tagging it, and not just how relevant it might be to some algorithm that doesn’t take into account who-knows-who. Just like the movies, we tend to value the judgments of people we know (or are familiar with online) more than people we don’t know.

Speaking of Google, their new customized news pages are going to change the way people get news. The idea isn’t new, just ask Yahoo. But what is different here? It’s the news, of course. Just news. All news. Your news. And they don’t even have RSS feeds yet!

Take a look at a personalized news page that I whipped up in about 3 minutes (easy as cake). I’ve got two customized sections, one for “blog” and one for “folksonomies”.

The Web is becoming the Aggregation Nation.

Gene Smith has a quick writeup of the IASummit Folksonomies Panel with the slides from each of the speakers. The slides, even without the context of voice, give a quick overview of some of the issues that were talked about.

If you’re familiar with any of my past posts on folksonomies:

• A Self-Referential Demonstration of the Power of the Del.icio.us Folksonomy
• Folksonomy Notes: Considering the Downsides, Behavioral Trends, and Adaptation
• Controlled Vocabularies and Folksonomies: Why Change is Good.
• Folksonomies and What’s At Stake

…then you’ll know that I’m very optimistic about them. From what I can tell from the slides (which isn’t much), Morville doesn’t think you can find anything in folksonomies, Merholz is hesitant, and Smith and Vander Wal optimistic. I really hope these folks write up their talks so that those of us who didn’t attend can get a clearer picture of what they’re saying.

Smith also mentions the feeling that folks don’t know where to use folksonomies…which is a question I discussed here: I’ve Heard of Folksonomies. Now How do I Apply them to My Site? (short answer: you don’t need tagging to create features that leverage actual user behavior, you just need something explicit and aggregable)

Moving down the conference trail brings us to SXSW (South by Southwest). There, a similar discussion panel “Leveraging Solipsism” went on and Liz Lawley tracked it on Many-to-Many. She found Don Turnbull’s part the most interesting, and she provided us with a few of his interesting questions about tagging:

• Who controls the sharing? And who controls those controls??
• anonymity vs community (and privacy issues related to this)
• free riders—people who never tag, just browse
• what constitutes a community? are personal relationships necessary? do they grow out of the information sharing, or define with whom you share information?

All interesting questions.

Also, over at Shelley Power’s burningbird, I found one of the comments to her in-depth overview of tagging called Accidental Smarts (which has an excerpt from bokardo), quite interesting. Hans Gerwitz makes a distiction between “bookmark aggregation”, “link aggregation”, and “tag aggregation”, using del.icio.us for the first and last terms and technorati for the middle one. Interesting… (note: scroll all the way to the bottom of that amazingly long page to read the comment in question)

Editor’s note: this is a new format for topics in which I want to aggregate and pass along information, but don’t have the time to do a full writeup. I’m calling the format “notes”. These posts will be about a single topic or two and will contain several links to resources that I find interesting along with a bit of contextual commentary. I hope you find them interesting, too. (most Notes won’t be this long)

I’ve been talking a lot lately about the theory behind controlled vocabularies. Most of my talk has been around the idea that they are not inclusive, don’t allow for change, and aren’t as user-centric as folksonomies, the new kid in town.

However, as two commentors politely pointed out, I’m not really giving controlled vocabularies their due. What I’m really doing is pointing out that controlled vocabularies are really hard to implement, which doesn’t exactly mean that they’re bad, but only that most don’t live up to their potential. I’m now convinced that if they were implemented successfully, with a dedicated team, that some of the issues I’ve brought up aren’t as big a detriment as I’ve painted them. (I’m really glad that the folks who comment on bokardo are really bright people)

One of those commentors, Bud Gibson, pointed out an interesting session he attended at IASummit 2005. (My boss Jared suggested that I go next year: he really enjoyed it). Anyway, the session Bud pointed out was given by a group of folks from IBM and was called: Traversing the Corporate Web: IA and Taxonomy at IBM. (here are the notes in .ppt format that didn’t work on my Mac). After combing through the copious notes (presentations are so much better than notes), I came away thinking “Wow, IBM’s intranet is huge!”. Also, I found the team’s problem statement very enlightening:

1. Confusion about how taxonomies work to solve information problems
2. No best practices for using and applying taxonomies
3. Disparate groups developing taxonomies
4. Process-heavy change management around taxonomy
5. No clear engagement path for users & stakeholders to affect change
6. Decentralized taxonomy tools and inconsistent taxonomy formats
7. Strict rules for terminology management that often don’t meet user’s needs

When considering these problems, remember that this taxonomy has over 3,700 categories! Pretty impressive, huh? Also, Bud’s own post about this session included the claim that IBM will be trying out folksonomies to help with these issues, but I didn’t notice that word in the notes…again, presentations are so much better than notes. Folksonomies or not, this team is dealing with issues that are pertinent to all designers.

Continuing on this theme, David Weinberger has written a report for Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0 called Taxonomies to Tags: From Trees to Piles of Leaves, in which he talks about tree-like knowledge structures vs. other options. The report costs a robust $80.00. For those of you without the momentum to pay for that, David has luckily provided the first chapter as a teaser. He’s got a bunch of good insights here, but I’ll only post his interesting conclusions, comparing trees (hierarchies), faceted systems, and tagging systems (folksonomies):

1. Because they are unambiguous, trees work well where information can be sharply delineated and is centrally controlled. Users are accustomed to browsing trees, so little or no end-user training is required. But trees are expensive to build and maintain and require the user to understand the subject area well: How do you find the recipe for bread soup if you don’t know to look in the “Tuscan Cooking” category?
2. Faceted systems work splendidly where an application is being used by such a wide range of users that no one tree going to match everyone’s way thinking. They are also easier maintain than trees because adding new item requires only filling in the information about facets, rather having make decision exactly which category it should go into.
3. Tagging systems are possible only if people are motivated to do more of the work themselves, for individual and/or social reasons. They are necessarily sloppy systems, so if it’s crucial to find each and every object that has to do with, say, apples, tagging won’t work. But for an inexpensive, easy way of using the wisdom of the crowd to make resources visible and sortable, there’s nothing like tags.

So, I hope these prove interesting. Thanks to Bud and David, this has been the inaugural set of Bokardo Notes…