For those interested in tagging, I’m giving a live virtual seminar (webcast) next Thursday (July 27): Users as Information Architects: Is Tagging Right for your Site? This is the second seminar we’ve given at UIE, and we’re really excited by the response and feedback generated by the first.

I’m focusing this talk on the idea that tagging might help designers organize huge amounts of information by letting their users do it for them. Heresy! You say. Well, in some places it might turn out that tagging beats IA hands down. In others, a traditional IA still works best.

However, if you’ve read The Del.icio.us Lesson, you know that it isn’t as simple as it seems at first glance. So I’ll be talking about the ins and outs of tagging, where it seems to work well, and where it doesn’t work.

Interestingly, both Amazon and Google seem to have tagging wrong…

Personal value precedes network value.

Continue Reading: The Del.icio.us Lesson

Here’s the slide deck for a talk I gave on Web 2.0 for the Greater Boston Chapter of the ACM, a non-profit educational and scientific society of computer professionals in the Boston area.

Web 2.0 – Leveraging the Network (2.74 MB pdf)

In the talk I spoke about how Web 2.0 companies distinguish themselves by leveraging the network of which they are a part. Brittanica, for example, has had a web site for quite some time and were slow to leverage the network in any particular way. Wikipedia, on the other hand, exists only because they used the available network to improve their contents communally. And Wikipedia, of course, is a much, much more popular site.

Continue Reading: Web 2.0 Talk – Leveraging the Network

Thomas Vander Wal is one happy man. Wouldn’t you be if you had been written up by Daniel Pink in the New York Times? Vander Wal, as many of you know, coined the term “Folksonomy”. He used it to describe what was happening on two up-and-coming web sites: Flickr and Del.icio.us. Now those two sites […]

Continue Reading: Folksonomy Has a Big Year

Update: Added slide deck. Ok, this is scary. I’m posting a podcast of me giving a talk on Web 2.0. (also posted on Brain Sparks, the supremely interesting UIE blog). My wife assures me that my voice does indeed sound like that, (much to my dismay). I was asked to speak at an NEASIST event […]

Continue Reading: Podcast of Web 2.0 Talk

The following bit emerged out of the What’s in a Tag session at the Web 2.0 Conference. Closely related to the popularity decay idea is the idea of emergent tags. Emergent tags are those tags that become more popular over time. The interesting thing about emergent tags is that they’re rare, but hugely valuable. Why […]

Continue Reading: Web2Con: Emergent Tags

The following bit emerged out of the What’s in a Tag session at the Web 2.0 Conference. One of the great features of tagging is seen when tags are aggregated. Then, we can see trends in what people are tagging: valuable bookmarks on Del.icio.us, cool pictures on Flickr, for example. These trends are trends of […]

Continue Reading: Web2Con: Popularity Decay in Tagging

In this Era of Interfaces, we have many criss-crossing themes. Among them: Recommendation Systems are an end goal of Web 2.0 applications. This is done by collaborative filtering over user-supplied data. Examples of interfaces include Del.icio.us Popular, Movielens Movie Recommendations, and iTunes Music Store Top Songs. More semantic Data Formats. Joe Reger’s new tool highlights […]

Continue Reading: Web 2.0 as the Era of Interfaces, Redux

(via Infodesign) In The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems Scott Golder and Bernardo Huberman of HP Labs examine folksonomies. From the abstract:

“Collaborative tagging describes the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content. Recently, collaborative tagging has grown in popularity on the web, on sites that allow users to tag bookmarks, photographs and other content. In this paper we analyze the structure of collaborative tagging systems as well as their dynamical aspects. Specifically, we discovered regularities in user activity, tag frequencies, kinds of tags used, bursts of popularity in bookmarking and a remarkable stability in the relative proportions of tags within a given url. We also present a dynamical model of collaborative tagging that predicts these stable patterns and relates them to imitation and shared knowledge.”

Doc Searls in Talking Markets:

“The Powers that Were are no longer the only ones with the power to communicate, influence and change culture as well as prices. Look how the market for (actually the category of) photography has changed, thanks not only to what Nikon, Sony, Canon and Flickr have done, but to what any of us can do with tagging.”