An Information Voyage of Discovery

Five Star Food – Folksonomies, Taxonomies and the Hybrid

2008-06-25T12:31:00.006+01:00

Having worked in the world of taxonomies for just under a year I have heard a lot about the use of taxonomies and folksonomies (otherwise known as social tagging where the categorisation of information is done by the end user), both in general and in the Enterprise workspace. Comments that I have heard and read have tended to be either pro-folksonomies or pro-taxonomies. Both arguments in my humble opinion appeared to be flawed, not so much because of the basis of the arguments, but from the fact that the statements are rarely objective.

I have just finished reading an excellent ebook by Daniela Barbosa which tackles this subject, advocating a hybrid approach in an objective, balanced and light-hearted manner. I say light-hearted as the ebook is written in the style of a cookery book - including comic style illustrations of the head chef herself. It sounds unusual, but is a very refreshing way to read about what is essentially a corporate/technical subject that all too often comes across as stuffy and boring.

Daniela takes the concepts of traditional taxonomies and social tagging, highlighting the pros and cons of each method for organising a company’s information (information coming in many forms such as web pages, podcasts and photos, not just the traditional documents such as word, excel and powerpoint). She examines the fears and misconceptions of the introduction of social tagging in to a corporate environment.

When you are focused on one particular approach it is easy to become blinkered in thinking that yours is the correct way of doing things and dismiss other ideas on an incomplete understanding. One thing that really caught my eye when talking about the use of social tagging for example (speaking from the viewpoint of a taxonomist) was how they can eliminate the need for focus groups to decide on how the corporate taxonomy needs to be expanded or amended. "In the past, information professionals conducted quarterly or biannual updates that might have required time-consuming focus groups and/or indepth interviews with group leaders. Tagging provides a continuous stream of refreshed metadata for evaluation." The participation of the end users by their tagging of the content also helps to gain a crucial consumer/user perspective, since the categorisation of the information exists for their benefit in the first place.

The cookbook then looks at the potential benefits of a hybrid system, taking the best of both worlds. Daniela details the benefits to the enterprise of this approach in a concise and distinct way, giving practical advice on what sort of questions to ask before deciding on the correct implementation and the kind of hybrid systems that could be used as well as covering best practices, common challenges and obstacles.

All in all this is a fantastic ebook providing five star food. It is also written well enough for those only recently joining the Knowledge Management environment to understand without getting bored and to come away with a better informed understanding of the use of both taxonomies and folksonomies in a corporate environment. If I were writing a book review, this would get five stars!

Bookmark tags with Firefox 3

2008-06-20T12:03:00.002+01:00

Well, apparently I am one of 8 million people who downloaded Firefox 3 on the first day of its release. I have to say that growing up in a corporate environment I have always tended towards Internet Explorer, but over the last five years or so I started playing around with Firefox. Initially I found it annoying as many websites were not fully supported in Firefox as they had been written for IE.

However things have changed. I no longer have this problem and I am becoming more familiar with some of the amazing add-ons that can be plugged in to Firefox. I now use Firefox as my default browser and whilst I do get a little frustrated when I try to open some links from e-mailed newsletters which turn out to be Word documents and hence for some reason do not appear to open properly, I am very happy with Firefox.

So I was quite excited when I found out there was a new release of Firefox. I don’t want to go in to all the details as I am certainly no expert. The one thing I did want to draw to attention was the bookmarking service in Firefox. It is a simple thing really, but when you now bookmark a page in Firefox, rather than just adding the page and organising it in your list of bookmarks you can actually tag the bookmark itself.
You can then search for bookmarks by tag or use the quick link to look at recently used tags. This adds greater flexibility to information retrieval and makes this retrieval more intelligent within the browser environment, rather than having a simple folder structure.

There are also plenty of bookmark add-ons already for Firefox which will hopefully make things even more useful. I haven’t had time to look at any of these yet, but if you want to have a look at what is available, click here. It would be great if Firefox could suggest tags for you to use in a similar way to Twine bookmarklets. Perhaps there is an add-on that allows that, but I haven’t found it yet. I’m sure I’ll write another post if I do find one though.

clipped from www.crn.com

Firefox 3 Download Count Over 8 Million

Firefox 3, the recently released open source browser from Mozilla, has claimed that over 8 million copies of the software were downloaded on Download Day. The company stated early that their goal was to surpass the initial release of Firefox 2, at 1.6 million downloads in 24 hours, and hit 5 million downloads

"We exceeded 8 million downloads in our 24 hour period," the blog states. Downloads were tracked from 11:16am PDT on June 17th to 11:16am PDT on the following day.

Clipmarks and more on Twine

2008-06-20T11:06:00.003+01:00

Below is an extract from an article from Hrafn Thorri Thorisson’s blog at Think Artifical about Twine. I thought I would add this as it gives a great description of bookmarklets, which adds to what I had already written. If you want to have a look at the full article, which covers the entire Twine service, click here.

In posting this extract I have tried using another new tool I came across called Clipmarks This plug in allows you to extract parts of a web page and then post them to your blog, add them to another web page or e-mail the extract to colleagues. It is an excellent tool for providing the right amount of information without having to send the entire link or article. With the tool you can extract videos and pictures as well as text.

It is very easy to use, however I have had a couple of issues in posting this article to my blog. Firstly I somehow managed to delete my comments whilst looking at the preview and in posting comments you can not use HTML, which is a shame as I initially had to add in URL’s for the above links rather than embed them in the text, which makes things a bit messy (this can be amended following the initial post of the blog in your standard blog editor). Also, once you get to the posting to blog page, there appears to be no way to adjust the information you have selected, you seem to have to start all over again if you change your mind on what should be posted.

Having said that, I still think this is a very useful tool and I am sure I will use it to e-mail colleagues parts of sites without having to add in the whole thing.

clipped from www.thinkartificial.org

Bookmarklet Example

If you’ve ever used an online bookmarking service you’re familiar with adding a link to your browsers toolbar, and then clicking it to bookmark the page you’re on for easy access online later. It’s the same concept here, except when you click the bookmarking link the pretty window below appears at the corner of your browser window.

The “Add to”, “Title” and “Summary” fields are shown truncated.
They auto-expand when clicked

None of the information you see above was entered by hand. The summary contains the text specified in the article metadata generated by Wordpress, the same regarding tags & title — plus Twine generates a thumbnail of the page.

So things are auto-extracted; with the option of adding or modifying them manually (you can manually select a pic from the page if you want). All we need to do is click save.

Online Communities

2008-05-27T11:15:00.005+01:00

I have to say that trying to keep a blog going is not the easiest thing in the world. There is so much information that is currently sitting out on the internet, I fell like I am just duplicating what is there. But I guess the purpose of a blog is to describe things from your own personal point of view and if others find that interesting or helpful, then it is useful. I do think that the more I post probably the easier this will become and I hope that my style of writing will develop as well!
One such site that was recommended to me a while back by a colleague is Twine. Twine is a tool that in their own words "helps you organize, share and discover information around your interests, with networks of like-minded people." As someone relatively new to the semantic workplace and the online community in general, I have found it difficult to get involved and have sometimes wondered at people who rave about online communities.

Anyway, I thought that Twine might be a good place to start. So what does Twine bring to the table? Firstly you can subscribe to groups of interest. People have set up discussions about an inordinate number of subjects ranging from sports and celebrities to internet technologies. I have joined a number of groups that discuss the semantic web, ontologies etc. In subscribing to these groups, I get sent an e-mail on a daily basis that shows me what new comments and links have been added to my twines within these groups. There is an ocean of knowledge out there both in published web pages and from the people that contribute to these groups on a regular basis and I am learning an awful lot. That said, I don’t always find the time to read all of the links that get sent to my daily digest of news, which can be frustrating. Also some of the articles are very technical or concern a particular technology that I have never heard of, rendering the article less than helpful for a novice such as myself.
Secondly I did think that being a member of twine would help me get to know more people within my world of Information Management, but usually people don't invite you to link with them. You have to ask them to link with you. It's an online version of going to conferences. You can stand in the corner and observe and listen in to others' conversations or you can get stuck in and introduce yourself to others. My own personal tendencies mean I steer towards the anonymous observer, but I do think that you get out what you put in and the more you get involved the more the community will become an invaluable tool. So that is my own personal challenge at the moment, to get more involved.

As well as being a community and a repository for information from others, it is a place where you can add your own information. You can either add bookmarks (or Bookmarklets as Twine refers to them) to your “My Items” section for yourself only or you can bookmark web pages that you would like to add to Twines for others to view. The one big advantage of using Twine for this is that it automatically tags the pages you add, which increases the value of that information. I must confess that I have not explored this functionality fully yet, but will hopefully do so in the near future.

Maiden voyage

2008-04-14T16:54:00.001+01:00

The aim of this blog is to share my experiences of discovering what is out there on the internet. I work as a taxonomy specialist for Dow Jones (shameless PR). However I am new to the position and am discovering vast amounts of information all the time. One of the most interesting aspects of my work is discovering the uses of taxonomies, ontologies etc. within the wider internet community, both in a business and in a social sense.
The advent of the semantic web as a widely adopted framework appears to be getting closer and closer from what I have read. The most mainstream evidence of this being in Yahoo's announcement that they would support semantic web standards.
So I have been taking a closer look at what the semantic web is. A useful article can be found on Nova Spivack's blog entitled Minding the Planet: The Meaning and the Future of the Semantic Web, although this may get a little technical at points for some people.
Anyway, I wanted to get my head around the semantic web, what it means and all the tools that take advantage of it, how they work etc. etc. etc. As well as that I wanted to take a look at some of the tools, or widgets as some refer to them, networking sites, social sites and discovery sites in order to further understand the possibilities and how that in turn affects the business that I am involved in.
So that is my aim. I hope to post blogs as and when I can and I hope to explain some of the tools out there, once I have understood them myself. This is essentially a journey for myself of discovery and I hope through this blog to share some of that with anybody that reads this and perhaps explain some of the things I come across or at least point people in the right direction.