My poster session at ASIST2007 (quite some time ago) went well. Lots of graphs of Cloudalicio.us and lots of discussion.

Got great feedback from a variety of people who had not seen this work before.

The short paper and poster can be found on my projects page.

I met quite a few people at the recent ASIS&T Annual Meeting in Milwaukee and told them I’d be getting my poster online.

The poster is up – Tag Decay: A View Into Aging Folksonomies (PDF 1.7MB)

It was a great problem to have people standing, listening, and asking questions for four hours. I just wish my throat had been warned ahead of time – I didn’t talk much the next day.

Thanks everyone.

ClaimID has gone into public beta. If you want to see what it’s all about – please use the key below to register for an account.

Skip the long lines at the beta signup form. Shhh. Don’t tell anyone.

Invite Key = a8dcaec7945a44b915cf81c1a5253070a70d81d6

Happy Saturday!

claimID is coming…

This is kind of off topic as it’s not directly about tagclouds – but I like to cross promote.

The site Fred and I are building is almost ready. We’re taking emails of interested parties now.

claimID will allow users to track, classify, annotate, prioritize and share the information that is about them online.

It’s about staking your claim to the things out there about you. It’s about drawing a line in the sand over the things that aren’t about you. It’s about managing the facts and the image you want. Take back some of the control that’s been lost to the search engines. Use the search engines to help you reclaim who you are.

- Terrell Russell

Humans remember things in a fuzzy way. The connections we make between disparate objects happen because of what they share in common – in time, in space, in smell and sound. Burning leaves? Grandparents’ house. Trampoline? 8th grade pool party. Florida? Hanging chads.

I’ve read about techniques of running through your rolodex, or address book, occasionally and without reason, just to see the names and visualize each person. This has been shown to be very effective in helping to remember people’s names since we are more likely to remember what we have seen recently – and forget what we have not.

Reinforcement plays a large role in memory and recall.

If websites begin to implement a tag cloud epoch, they can begin to “forget” the stale tags in their system. Sites can begin to have their most visible tags dissolve in an organic, human way. As people do not continue to tag a certain thing a certain way, this thing should fade slowly from view. It should still be findable (and re-findable) through search and browse, but the tags describing it should count less and less when considering what hot lists to put the item on.

This arbitrary date of oldness, this epoch, should be customizable, of course. But it should be available and it should be prominent. Allow a user to define how far back the tags should be counted. Allow a user to define how old is too old and how recent is recent enough.

Folksonomy will be around for a while, I suspect. It has proven itself useful in many ways – probably some yet to be seen. Some of yesterday’s simple tags will seem quaint tomorrow. Give the user the power to decide whether quaint is signal or quaint is noise. Go implement the “Since” date filter on all your tag clouds today.

Tag clouds are young. The term folksonomy itself was coined just over a year ago by Thomas Vander Wal on the IA Institute’s Members’ Discussion List in a response to Gene Smith and has yet to be a word even a medium-sized minority has heard, much less come to understand.

However, here on Cloudalicio.us, we can already see that many items being tagged since the beginning of del.icio.us have stabilized. New tags being added to these URLs are no longer visibly affecting the overall weights as each tag’s marginal weight has decreased since the first tag was assigned.

We have a better view of what everyone “has thought” of an item by looking at it’s full, cumulative tag cloud, but we miss what everyone “is thinking” of an item when we allow ourselves to look back into time and see possibly “stale” tags from long ago intermingled with more contemporary, more recent tags.

This is not to say that tags from long ago are not valid or no longer important. They are. It’s just that if we’re going to be looking at tag clouds as tea leaves into what a population thinks about something, we need to recognize that unless we silence the voices from long ago, they’ll continue to speak to us and influence our counts. Opinion polls for presidential elections are considered old almost before they get to press. Yesterday’s numbers don’t mean anything. Having snapshots in time is what allows trending to be done.

Trending in tags, here on Cloudalicio.us and everywhere else, has been cumulative only. We do not yet have the tools to slice all this new data and make it more meaningful than to look at it in toto, in summary form.

And so, we need to define a tag cloud epoch.

Tag clouds should be viewed within a framework of five points in time.

1. system epoch
2. tag cloud epoch
3. zoom window start
4. zoom window end
5. now

As it currently stands, most systems that have tagging enabled count all the tags between the two outermost points in time (#1 and #5). Cloudalicio.us currently allows four of these to be defined (#1, #3, #4, #5) when used with Date Zooming. Unfortunately, there is no current way to define the point in time from which tags should start to be counted. The addition of point #2 is what will let us see any arbitrary slice in time. This will allow us to see what a population was thinking during a specific week or month about a specific item.

Hopefully, it will appear here soon…

Ian Davis talks about how tagging is too expensive and will not, in the end, be quite the revolution…

I’ve come to the conclusion that this simple technology is hobbled by being expensive. This worries me. I’m not convinced that tagging will persist in the long term and I have a feeling that five years from now we’ll be looking back at the fad that was tagging and shaking our heads over the vast inpenetrable databases of tagged content. Then we’ll get back to Google and to our librarians and get on with finding the things that matter to us.

The advantage classification holds is that you can lookup the classification you need and be confident that you have found all that is available. With tagging there is no way to exhaustively search all the possible tags that people might have used, in all possible languages and spellings.

But, it’s not about exhaustivity.

It’s about the ease of finding enough to satisfy the searcher’s need for information. If the need for information is very deep, then it’s up to the searcher to continue her research. If the need for information is fairly shallow (or rather, anything other than deep), the searcher can feel fairly confident that others have been interested in the topic area before and done enough prior heavy lifting on the classification and categorization of resources to satisfy her search.

‘All that is available’ seems to be a strawman in this discussion. Very very few searches could ever truthfully be exhaustively answered. In fact, it’s the professional researcher’s opinion we usually trust when it comes to whether something is related or not. With raw information, as opposed to physical artifacts, I’d even venture that an objectively exhaustive search result (regardless of how it was organized/returned) is impossible.

I think Clay has made a very strong argument and I think he’s hedged his statements where appropriate. Tagging has shifted the cost of classification and categorization. The tools for elegant retrieval aren’t here yet.

But they’re coming.

That’s what I hear him saying.

I also think, in the long term, professionals will still be professionals. They provide information on the resources available and how best to use them. Before, this consisted of the actual sorting and managing of the hierarchy. In the future, this will be much more based in managing the many voices and scrubbing the messiness that bubbles up from below.

Embrace the messiness.