Tag Are You It Taxonomies

1

• Tag! Are You It? Taxonomies Folksonomies in
  Practice
• Stephen Rhind-Tutt, President, May 28, 2008

2
Overview

• About Alexander Street Press
• Is there value in social tagging?
• What lies behind the value
• Some practical examples
• The future

3
Alexander Street Press
Sociology
World Literature
Performing Arts, Drama, and Film
Religion
American Civil War
Social and Cultural History
Womens History
Black Studies
Music
Counseling
4
The People vs. The Machine
vs
5
The masses speak

• All tag-based classification of Internet
  resources (such as web sites) is done by human
  beings, who understand the content of the
  resource, as opposed to software, which
  algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning
  of a resource.
• Wikipedia, entry on social bookmarking, May
  24th, 2008

6
The masses speak

• All tag-based classification of Internet
  resources (such as web sites) is done by human
  beings, who understand the content of the
  resource, as opposed to software, which
  algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning
  of a resource.
• Wikipedia, entry on social bookmarking, May
  24th, 2008

• Not all tag based classifications are done by
  humans machine based tagging is large and
  growing
• Many humans dont understand or agree on the
  content of the resource
• Whos to say what the content actually is?
• Whos to say what a resource is?
• Social tagging requires computers to leverage
  collective human input using algorithms
  amongst other tools.

7
Actually its not the machine vs. the human
its the machine and the human
8
Another view
9
Is there value in social tagging?
10
gt3,000 photos of Alexandria, VA

11
Performance
Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search?, Paul
Heymann, Georgia Koutrika, and Hector
Garcia-MolinaDept. of Computer Science, Stanford
University
12
Folksonomy
13
Cirrus on delicious
Item 22 describes cirrus (the cloud) 7 people
tagged it.
14
Citeulike
15
Taxonomy vs. Folksonomy
16
Taxonomy vs. Folksonomy
Effectiveness
Folksonomies
Taxonomies
Popularity
49.7 m users (E-Bay) 2.7 Bn searches per month
(Google)
17
Looking closer
18
Internet Trust anti pattern
Effectiveness

3. Unwashed masses start using it
High
4. System almost breaks
2. Benefits from being non-hierarchical, easy
participation, quality participants
Medium
5. Controls put in place
1. System started by trusted parties
Low
Time
AfterThe Journal of the Future, Geoffrey Bilder,
SSP, 2005
19
Social Tagging

• Personalization
• Speed
• Discovery
• Reach
• Versatility

• No standard keywords
• No standard structure/hierarchy
• Unorthodox and personal tags

• Multiple Meanings
• Mis-tagging due to spelling
• Synonym/antonym confusion
• Advertising
• Spamming

The Good
The Bad
The Mixed
20
Human and machine interactions

• Passive
• Most commented, bloggede-mailed, viewed, cited
• Terms culled from associated articles, comments
• Measuring link traffic, use, search terms matched
  to results.
• Data mining, authority inference,

• Active
• User assigns terms
• User selects terms
• User comments

Delici.ous, flickr
Googles Page rank, etc
21
Leveraging existing processes

• Much social tagging is a by-product of other
  processes
• Central place to store your bookmarks (Delicious)
• Place to share your photographs (Flickr)
• Place to meet friends (My Space)
• Store your bibliography (Zotero, Citeulike)
• Have fun (Google Image Labeller)
• Give students classwork (Alexander Street Press)

22
Activity vs. Passivity

Google Search
Zotero Citeulike ASP Playlists
Delicious ASP Submission tools
Mixed
Active
Passive
23
Issues user tagging
Tags
President?
Philadelphia?
Shirts?
Womens Rights?
24
Issues granularity
25
Different views of the same item
Long term factors influencing combustion and burn
rates in North American forests. David Jones,
Journal of Forest Husbandry, Sept 1999.
OSH-ROM(Occupational Health and Safety)
CAB (Husbandry)
Biosis (Species)
Agricola (Agriculture)
26
Humans are good at
27
What works

• Playlists on ASPs music and video products
  gt20,000 users
• Over 120,000 playlists created so far
• 1,000 created by ASP
• 42,000 user created
• 80,000 derivative playlists

28
Example Dance in Video
29
(No Transcript)
30
(No Transcript)
31
Playlists
32
Playlists
33
Playlists
34
Summary
35
Social Tagging evolution
Social Network
Trackback, RSS Feeds
Currency
Importance/Trust
Descriptive Power
Popularity
Larger networks
Suggestions, mapping
36
The future of social tagging

• A lot to offer
• It works best
• In (very) large networks
• When it is a byproduct or alongside another
  process
• It will always ends up being (partially)
  controlled
• Network effects arent open to most of us
• Discipline focus is the best way to add value

37
Man empowered by machine
38
www.alexanderstreet.com