http://delicious.com/help/thirdpartytools

Welcome, all tens of visitors! I promise, this site is still kicking – and should get some polish once I get this lit review completed… Silly PhD…

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.

It’s quite remarkable what they’ve done with the new layout and UI – and I applaud them for the deep understanding of the ways people have used their service and continue to bookmark, network, and republish their content.

However, they’ve killed Cloudalicio.us again – alas.

If anyone has knowledge of how to get at the full historical data for a particular URL – please let me know. The parser is easy enough to tweak – but without the right data, the show cannot go on. I’ve found the manual paging option, but… that’s not quite enough for a live mashup…

Bah.

This new IP is the effect of moving Cloudalicious to a Solaris 11 Container at TextDrive.

Sooo very speedy.

In addition, having again looked at this code after it lay dormant for 8 months, I see a couple things to tweak – so expect some small changes in the next few days. Although they may not be as exciting as this newfound speed…

Thanks to Jason for helping it go down smooth.

In clicking around at del.icio.us, I realized that the /url history pages are making available (again) the full post history of the users who have bookmarked that URL.

Before the shutdown in March, the /url history pages were displaying full historical posting data, providing the three entities that make up folksonomy (person, item, tags) as well as the date on which the tagging occurred. Cloudalicio.us would grab that data, parse it, and then display a graph allowing the visitor to see how the del.icio.us-using-public’s opinion of that page had changed over time.

Today, I realized that the full folksonomy data was again available (person, item, tags) but the date data is now compressed into postings by month. And that’s okay – it’s actually less points to graph, so the graphs should generate a little more quickly now. Additionally, I’ve set the cache to 15 days instead of 1 day as daily updates wouldn’t look that different on these new graphs anyways.

So, Behold, we’re back! Everybody say “Welcome back, Cloudy”!

Oh, and I’ve updated the greasemonkey script (v3) as well.

I am hoping the value of Cloudalicious is large enough that either an agreement can be worked out with del.icio.us/Yahoo! to access the datafeed or Cloudalicious will need to find another source of tagging data. Any ideas?

Off to SXSW this morning. Perhaps I’ll see some of you there.

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

Invite Key = a8dcaec7945a44b915cf81c1a5253070a70d81d6

Happy Saturday!

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

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.

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…