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January 31, 2005
Posted by David Weinberger
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Posted by Ross Mayfield
Dan Bricklin picks up a thread from Shelley to AKMA and Winer on blog post categorization (David Weinberger tracks it, but also see his recent newsletter on tags and Jay's comments) to suggest Guiltlessness as a design criteria for a type of successful system.
I think Dave has pointed out a key problem with tagging. It seems like a nice idea but it requires us to always do it. The system wants 100% participation. If you don't do it even once, or don't do it well enough (by not choosing the "right" categories), then you are at fault for messing it up for others -- the searches won't be complete or will return wrong results. Guilt. But because it's manual and requires judgment you can't help but mess up sometimes so guilt is guaranteed. Doing it makes you feel bad because you can't ever really do it right. So, you might as well not play at all and just not tag.
This is the opposite of what I was getting at in my old Cornucopia of the Commons essay about volunteer labor. In that case, in a good system, just doing what you normally would do to help yourself helps everybody. Even helping a bit once in a while (like typing in the track names of a CD nobody else had ever entered) benefited you and the system. Instead of making you feel bad for "only" doing 99%, a well designed system makes you feel good for doing 1%. People complain about systems that have lots of "freeloaders". Systems that do well with lots of "freeloading" and make the best of periodic participation are good. Open Source software fits this criteria well and its success speaks for itself.
In Cornucopia of Cooperation and Social Spillover, I suggested that tagging was an example of the Volunteer Manual method of building a database. I still find this true, because:
- Blog post categorization is still not tagging, but will be soon
- Tagging in del.icio.us and Flickr supports freeloading and rewards contribution
Categorization in blogging still lacks a easy tagging interface. In Typepad today, for example, you have to (a) add a new tag to your list, and (b) be done if you want just one tag, or (b) select multiple tags from your list. Encouraging one tag is categorization, is the pursuit of topic by design.
The Topic Exchange (nod to Phillip and M2M's Seb) lets you categorize your post through a trackback or manual entry into a topic channel on an aggregating site. More persistent groups within this system had a fascination with RidiculouslyEasyGroupForming, such as social software bloggers. Easy New Topics (nod to Matt and Paolo), took additional steps to enable extensible categorization within the blog client and easy group forming around topics. K-collector's pioneering implementation of ENT did bring together some early adopter bloggers around select topics, not too coincidentally among those more fascinated with ontology like KM bloggers. Note that contribution to these systems is not a byproduct of regular use (without adding a category, your post is not added to the database) and has relatively high transaction costs. Since use centers around formed groups, I would agree that guilt may come into play.
You can, and many do, use del.icio.us and Flickr without adding tags to links and pictures as objects. You still contribute value to the system, the object itself, which others can pick out of the stream to add value. When you do tag, however, you gain the reward of your own organization and the emergent structure of the group. Use centers, first and foremost, around individuals instead of groups, so guilt is barely a factor.
Dan's original example of Napster demonstrated Cornucopia effects where Greed is Good. You can take advantage of the common resource, but as a byproduct, you contribute to the commons, thereby increasing its value. But it must be noted that in some social systems, Guilt is Good. In particular, it can be used to curb negative behavior and even freeloading, which can increase the value of the system. UCLA researchers have highlighted the role of shunning in social systems:
"Up to this point, social scientists interested in the evolutionary roots of cooperative behavior have been hard-pressed to explain why any single individual would stick his neck out to punish those who fail to pull their weight in society," [Anthropologist Robert] Boyd said. "But without individuals willing to mete out punishment, we have a hard time explaining how societies develop and sustain cooperative behavior. Our model shows that as long as it is socially permissible, withholding help from a deadbeat actually proves to be in an individual's self-interest."
Perhaps a system isn't social if it only has first order commons dilemmas (governing the resource) and doesn't support management of the second order (governing each other). When a group explicitly forms around a tag, guilt may come into play (for example, shame on you people for not posting really ugly and fairly pointless parking lot photos!), and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
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| Category: social software
January 30, 2005
Posted by Clay Shirky
Matt Biddulph has put up a del.icio.us tag stemmer, which will take your username (or indeed any username) and point out the possible inconsistencies based on word stemming (tag/tags/tagging, etc.) It will also take a URL, scan all users who tagged it, and look for the same thing.
What it will not (yet) do is return the full list of tags sorted by frequency, listing both tags with alternate stems and those without, but I assume this is simply a matter of time.
This is part of why I think tags are such a big deal — they are annotations for the only native unit of accounting the Web has, namely the URL; the annotations are themselves URLs that can be further annotated; and they are simple enough in both concept and technical design that third-party services like ‘stemtags’ can easily be built on top of the system.
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Posted by danah boyd
Clay’s right - i’m a huge skeptic, although i don’t attribute it to the academy at all. My first reaction to hype is and always was critique (unless, of course, i’m doing the hyping). This has resulted in me always ::raising eyebrows:: over everything from the best bands to “i just met the best girl in the world” stories.
I’m not actually in disagreement with Clay about classification - i am, after all, in a librarian school. My first indoctrination was “classification is impossible - here are a bazillion techniques that we use to try to get better schemas.” So, when i critique folksonomy, it is not in comparison to formal structures of classification. My critical reaction comes from any and all concerns that folksonomy is the panacea to hundreds of years of librarian woe. I know that formal systems are screwed, but i think that folksonomy has its own set of problems.
While i acknowledge the comparisons that can be made about the problematic similarities between folksonomy and formal classification, i also think that the effort towards ‘accuracy’ is actually clouding a few major differences. The differences are not that surprising, but very important. It comes down to benevolent dictator vs. crowd behavior. Sometimes the benevolent dictator goes way wrong, but also, sometimes crowds are scary.
There’s a problematic feature to crowds - they like to homogenize. Yes, the guy with the mohawk can assert his independence, but folks might trample him. Or he might be left to his own planet. Should he be given more attention than others because he is different? Should a classification schema be concerned with frequency/popularity or the full range? What does it mean to classify things that are rare viewpoints? Who gets to decide? That’s a heavily contested domain in classification.
Folksonomy isn’t asking the questions about the implications of collective action classification. Who benefits? Who becomes marginalized? What priorities bubble up? How does pressure to homogenize affect the schema and the people involved? How are some people hurt or offended by decisions that are made? Should moderation of classifications occur? If so, what are the consequences?
I totally appreciate the just-do model that is often espoused here, but i don’t subscribe to it. I believe that you have to go into the doing with the questions always at hand and always in check. What makes formal classification interesting is not its end result, its “technology” but the huge discourse around it, trying to figure out the implications of any and all decisions. Those questions have been around for years and i think that it’s important that we use those questions, those concerns, not for comparison but as a guideline for our hyping.
In short, i love tagging and folksonomy. But once it is taken serious and people are talking about ‘accuracy’ and being offended, questions that must be asked despite the hype - “folksonomy is better” is not good enough for me.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Press request by proxy — for someone working on a story about the wikipedia, is there anyone out there whou would consider themselves either an avid user of wikipedia, or an avid contributor to Wikipedia? If so, drop me a line.
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January 29, 2005
Posted by Ross Mayfield
Cross-posted because this raises interesting questions of leveraging top-down machine generated content on the cheap and trying to make it social not only for monetization — but enclosure and bottom-up participation to enhance quality.
This is pretty interesting. Web’s Biggest not only claims to be the biggest search engine, but the biggest wiki.
It leverages existing search engines and scrapes the whois database. The spider captures summaries, which is all the engine searches, which gives you easy breadth, but not depth. The summaries are far from perfect, but it seems the idea is they are meant to be changed. A smart hack, if legal (Andy Beal wonders if this violates whois guidelines).
Users can edit search results and must provide their email addresses to be notified when there is an edit. Past edits are stored below. This doesn’t make it a wiki whatsoever, its closer to blog comments, but an annotated search engine isn’t a bad idea. The founding concept for Google wasn’t a search engine, but developing the annotated web. Kwiki-based Wikalong is the closest to that in the wiki world, blogs are the analog.
Revenue model seems to be some advertising, but mostly paid directory
listings and driving comissioned activity to other search engines. In effect, anyone can modify the site summary, and you pay for a more permanent directory description alongside the chaos. So text ads are defending your territory, perhaps extortion could be a good business if it became popular or useful for reasons I can’t fathom.
Even if its not a wiki, it raises an interesting question. Can you automate information collection and then rely on bottom-up participation to make it useful? This is the opposite pattern of social software, where you may apply some automation to help sift through and reveal social signals. Wikipedia had one autopopulation in its history, importing the CIA World Factbook, but it didn’t stimulate much refining activity. Web’s Biggest tries to incent participation through small enclosed interests and email notification to return, but I’d bet that real community is a much stronger force.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
danah’s great piece on cultural issues in folksonomy gets to a key piece of the debate, namely that we can’t talk about categorization issues like accuracy without also talking about the culture that created the categories. However, I feel a curious disconnect between her exposition of the issues and her tone. There seems to be skepticism about folksonomic tagging in her post (though possibly it is just the reflexive skepticism of the academy.)
In any case, I want to point out that, for almost all the issues she raises, those characteristics are worse, much worse, in formal classification schemes than in folksonomies in general, and folksonomic tagging in particular.
At the risk of running good writing through the sausage grinder (and re-ordering it to boot) her list of issues is broadly:
1. There are perspective problems (e.g. the tag ‘me’ on Flickr.)
2. Tags can be gamed (in the manner of the MLK/Technorati tags)
3. Classification schemes are always culturally dependent
4. Many terms are contested
5. Some words cannot be simply translated literally
6. Some words have multiple or conflicting meanings
All the items on that list are true, and items 1 and 2 on the list are genuine design issues. System gaming is an issue, and can be fought with, inter alia, opacity of ranking method (the Google way), reputation markets (the Ebay way), continual post-hoc edits (the Wiki way), and so on. Each of these solutions may be tried in different places where folksonomy takes hold.
And for the relative tag problem, there may be a small enough number of those kind of tags — me, toread, unfiled, etc — that we can make a dictionary filter. But the relativity can also be interesting when crossed-tabbed with the identity of the tagger; I don’t want ‘toread’ or ‘funny’ generally, but I do want Liz’s ‘toread’ tags, and Matt Webb’s ‘funny’ links.
Items 3-6 on that list are different because while they are problematic in folksonomies, they are more — much more — problematic in top-down classification systems. Folksonomies represent progress in those areas, in other words.
You want cultural dependence? The Library of Congress, in its top level categories for geographic regions, lists “The Balkan Penninsula” as one main entity, and “Asia” as another. Contested terms? Try finding queer literature in any library classification scheme. And so on. Folksonomic tagging improves on this by exposing cultural dependence and contestedness, rather than denying its existence, or hiding it by fiat.
(As an aside, the signal loss from the pressures brought to bear on official categorizations is a common theme in classification generally. The entire alt. hierarchy in usenet came into being because there was a proposal to create rec.drugs, and there was concern that usenet, running in part over an NSF-funded network, would be shut down. The alt.* hierarchy was a compromise, to allow some face saving in suggesting that the *.drugs group was not ‘official’. And of course, alt. (an early folksonomy, albeit highly compromised by usenet’s hierarchical design) ballooned to many times the size of the ‘official’ usenet.)
The aggregate good of tags is not that they create consensus or accuracy; they observably don’t, and this is very observability is much of their value. Pick any popular del.icio.us link, click on the “and X other people” link under the URL, and you’ll see how that page is tagged by dozens or hundreds of people. There is both broad alignment around a few terms, but there is also a long tail of other views, which you don’t get in formal systems.
To take but one example, of the 114 people who tagged the Buffyology database, 66 tagged it buffy, 58 tagged it tv, and only 12 tagged it database, the third most popular tag. But 4 people tagged it sf or scifi, 2 tagged it fantasy, and 2 tagged it vampire. So the ambiguity between the literature of fantasy and of science fiction is exposed in the tagging, and the possibility of viewing Buffy as a thing related not mainly to TV but to vampires is also preserved.
So this is what I don’t get: I can’t imagine that anyone concerned about hegemony and marginalization would prefer professionally structured categories over folksonomy. If you care about contested terms and the risks of marginalization, del.icio.us, Flickr, et al do more to improve our access to, and understanding of, marginalization and contestation than any current alternative.
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January 28, 2005
Posted by danah boyd
I love the conversations that have emerged recently on folksonomy/ethnoclassification/tagging/ontology (see del.icio.us tag folksonomy for a good collection of them). Of course, i’m particularly a fan of skeptical posts that raise the social consequences flag (thank you Liz and Rebecca). I wanted to bring up a few things about culture that i feel haven’t been really addressed yet. (My apologies if i’ve missed them.)
First, don’t forget Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Classification schemes are always culturally dependent based on how people organize information. There is nothing universal about the terms that we use, the relationship between those terms and the meanings behind them. Many terms are contested, used differently by different populations for different reasons and otherwise inconsistent. (Take a look at Raymond Williams’ Keywords if you want to see how different socio-cultural terms are employed over time in Western culture alone.)
What makes the tagging phenomenon utterly fascinating is that there is a collective action component to it. We love to see how people will come to common consensus on relevant terms. But part of what makes it valuable is that, right now, most of the people tagging things have some form of shared cultural understandings. The “in the know” groups using these services are very homogenous and often have shared values and thus offers valuable related links. This helps explain why Rebecca Blood is concerned about the MLK tags - they signify a lack of shared common ground. In tagging, quality is not just about ‘accuracy’, but about what cultural assumptions dominate. This is also the problem that motivated my earlier post on digital xenophobia.
The translation problem alone offers insight into the problems of collective action tagging (see Benjamin). There are tons of words that cannot be simply translated literally both for linguistic and cultural reasons (such as my colleague’s favorite - ohrwurm from German or any number of metaphors). And there are tons of words with multiple and conflicting meanings. This is why reading a translation of something is never the same - it’s not just a matter of linguistic translation, but cultural translation. That’s almost impossible.
Flipped around, the culture of the people tagging says a lot about how they use language that is quite valuable. We might want to see everything with a particular tag using the sense that we mean.
There is also a perspective problem. Think about the tag ‘me’ on Flickr. This is fantastic when we’re organizing stuff for ourselves, but such a tag is inherently dependent on perspective.
These questions have been raised as ones of ‘accuracy’ but they’re not. They’re about perspective and culture. Accuracy is only meaningful if we share the same cultural assumptions. Ironically, we know that culture matters at some level, if only via our collective choice to discuss FOLKsonomy and ETHNOclassification.
Given that we’re dealing with culture and structure, we must also think through issues of legitimacy and power. How are our collective choices enforcing hegemonic uses of language that may marginalize?
Design questions then emerge. How do we deal with conflicting cultural norms as more people are engaged in the act of tagging? How useful are tags across cultures? Do we only gain value from collective-action tagging amongst groups of shared values? If so, how do we implement that? And what are the social consequences for explicitly delimiting culture online?
[Also posted on apophenia]
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Posted by Clay Shirky
You can tell how behind I am on my reading — just got to the Monday NY Times article on Friendster, to find our own Ross and danah quoted:
“Social networking is at this very interesting point,” said Ross Mayfield, a pioneer in the social networking field and the chief executive of Socialtext, which sells software for collaborative writing and editing via the Internet. “These companies are at the stage where they need to demonstrate real results in terms of revenues and their business model. That voyeuristic fascination of seeing who has the most friends has worn off for a lot of people.”
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January 26, 2005
Posted by Clay Shirky
It’s so good, I don’t even want to comment:
A SCHOOLBOY with a fascination for Poland and wildlife has uncovered several significant errors in the latest — the fifteenth — edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Lucian George, 12, a pupil at Highgate Junior School in North London, was delving into the volumes on Poland and wildlife in Central Europe when he noted the mistakes.
More, much more, here.
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Posted by Ross Mayfield
 Yesterday I had a long chat with one of the humans at Microsoft, Marc Smith, who runs the Netscan project which provides analysis of Usenet. During our conversation he shared how they are using social network analysis to identify types of participants in threaded discussions.
 One of these types is represented in these three graphs produced by Danyel Fisher, also of the Microsoft Research Community Technologies Group, is of Answer People. Marc described them simply as people who answer people who dont answer people. They are the central nodes with many uni-directional ties. APs are what Malcom Gladwell would call Mavens, their influence is through their expertise, which they share widely.
 AOL isn’t just handing over Usenet to Google, Netscan has a firmer grasp of this very long tail. It will be disconcerting for most to find data about you made explicit and visualized, especially when its personified, which raises real issues. At a certain point, being Profiled (RSS) as a Maven for Windows XP (RSS) who has bad Mondays may innundate you with pitches every other day of the week, so you might stop. The difference between explicit and implicit categorization and relationships is going to blur very quickly.
UPDATE: Go see Danyel Fisher’s subsequent comment on AOL/Usenet and his comment below which implies Connectors in these images. Also take the Rorschach test for yourself.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
AOL is no longer offering usenet access.
This feels to me like they’re tearing down an old diner in a neighborhood I used to live in. I never go there anymore, but I spent 5 years of my life on usenet, and 2 of those years in a fever I can’t characterise as anything other than addiction. I learned to write there, and it’s one of only two places where I had people I’d call real friends who I never met IRL. (The other was Old Man Murray, RIP.)
The moment AOL started offering newsgroup access, it created the ‘long September’, where the flood of clueless newbies became more or less permanent, in contrast with previous years where every September saw an influx of freshman at colleges with usenet access, who were then flamed to high heaven acculturated, and the whole thing settled back down by October.
It was also the first sign that the logic of value through interconnection was higher than value through exclusivity. (AOL’s genius, unrivalled, I believe, in the modern era, was to say one thing to investors and another to users, telling Wall Street it was a media company, but selling communications tools and the attendant access to community to its users, functions that always dwarfed use of its media properties.)
There’s not much to eulogize here — the era when you had to explain to the press that the internet was more than just usenet are long over, and AOL’s vital place in the ecosystem wanes each day with the fortunes of dial-up access generally. Over at MeFi, they’re trying to revel in the idea that the long September is ending, but that’s not whats happening here — AOL’s decision to disconnect its NNTP servers cedes usenet to spam and usenet access to Google, which things were each a done deal some time ago.
Still, it feels kind of funny. Usenet was such a spectacular experiment in the annals of human communication, the idea that it’s value isn’t worth the cost of keeping the servers running comes as a marker of things I already knew, but which still feel different when they become facts in the world.
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Posted by Kevin Marks
I'm very impressed that we have been debating bottom-up vs top-down, hierarchic ontologies vs tag sets for a week now, and no-one has yet quoted Borgès' animal tagsonomy.
The point that struck me today is that many of the objections to tagging are really objections to homophones. Human language is a classic example of an emergent system for sharing meaning, and tagging is just an extension of this to a new domain.
As David keeps saying, we humans are good at ambiguity, allusion and amphigory, so we should worry less about disambiguating things for machines, and work on growing more new connections.
Update: britta, creator of the onomatopoeic ontology, points out that Borgès essay on Wilkins, from which the animals example is taken, is highly germane to this discussion.
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Posted by Seb Paquet
Following a suggestion I made on my personal blog, Alf Eaton has built a visual interface to the tag landscape that is collectively produced by del.icio.us users, basically feeding the “related tags” listings from del.icio.us into a TouchGraph browser. Here’s a screenshot I made, showing the current “lay of the land” around social software:
(layout hint: you can right-click the background to fiddle with the layout to get a clean capture)
Alf’s tool lets you navigate around tags, expand topics you want to explore in more depth, and access the corresponding del.icio.us and Technorati tag pages. I think this could be a quite useful tool when you’re feeling your way into a new topic area and want to benefit from the knowledge of other people who have been around there. Think “Okay, so what is this newfangled “folksonomy” thing all about? Does it relate to anything I’m already familiar with?”
Subscription mapping
And for something completely different, Paolo Massa then asked Alf for a social network map based on users’ del.icio.us subscriptions, which wasn’t too long in coming. Because users can subscribe to tag feeds (you can recognize those because they start with an asterisk), people and topics are also connected, yielding a “Who and What” map showing both types of objects in the same graph. Because tag subscriptions are uncommon, it might actually be more illuminating to connect people and topics based on tagging habits rather than subscription.
This social visualization tool works wonders in the way of revealing implicit information that is otherwise hard to see. For instance, if you start with Liz’s subscription network, and then double-click the “sebpaquet” node, you’ll immediately see that we are both tracking links from Howard Rheingold, Joi Ito, Jay Bibby, and Clay. The advanced options let you do things such as displaying only nodes that are no more than, say, two degrees away from the node you last clicked, letting you get a sense of the immediate neighborhood of a person.
(for related prior art, see also the Touchgraph LiveJournal browser, which operates on a dataset that is at least an order of magnitude larger)
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January 25, 2005
Posted by Clay Shirky
After my little tirade yesterday, my friend Kio pointed out that ontology is a term of art for almost every group that uses it, and that it has very different meanings in those various groups.
For the metaphysicians, ontology is inquiry into the nature and relations of being, with a particular focus on fundamental categories. That’s not what I mean.
The definition of ontology I’m referring to is derived more from AI than philosophy: a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization. (Other glosses of this AI-flavored view can be found using Google for define:ontology.) It is that view that I am objecting to.
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Posted by Kevin Marks
This is a drive-by response to David's 'namespaces to the rescue' post, where he says:
a table of synonyms that’s compiled manually and/or automatically by doing clustering analysis can enable us to tag local but search global. Or if generalized tag sets emerge (and I think they will, albeit not truly globally), we can use them as well as our local tags. For example, if a tag set called “AmeriTag” emerges, we could tag a photo as [ameritag:hotdog food_eating_contest obscene_idiots], where the second tags are purely our own. (Namespaces to the rescue!)
This is exactly why the rel="tag" model takes a URL (not a URI) as the tag parameter. URLs have namespaces. In this case we have a choice of tagspaces - using http://technorati.com/tag/[tagname] is one way to do it, but of course you can use Wikipedia or AmeriTag or whichever disambiguated tagspace you like as your link.
However, by making them URLs that actually locate something useful, they make sense as visible links within your posts. (more technical details here)
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January 24, 2005
Posted by Clay Shirky
Great post on folksonomy from Bokardo.com:
Folksonomy Notes: Considering the Downsides, Behavioral Trends, and Adaptation
One thing that I mentioned in response to Liz’s post was that I feel we should keep in mind how adaptive we humans are. It is a fundamental talent we have. Too often, I think, we ignore this quality, pushing for consistency over everything else, when all we need is a little explanation of how things work. Once we know how they work, we’re fine.
I’m not advocating a willy-nilly approach to designing architectures for humans: I’m advocating a willy-nilly approach to designing architectures by humans, who use a willy-nilly approach when reading and writing and speaking words.
and another on tagging by Tim Bray: What Do Tags Mean?
I think that it would be nice if a huge number of web pages converged on using a simple, flat, shared set of tags with entries like vancouver and mac os x and tsunami relief, which the current setup works well for.
But I think it would also be nice if, once we have Atom, there are feeds about Petroleum Geology with their own tags, and feeds about Military Training too, and they each have their own drill tag. Which Atom would support nicely.
Of course, the only people who would need to know about the Petroleum or Military tags would be people specifically looking for that kind of stuff; someone looking for a drill tag generically would probably get both and maybe that would be fine.
Bottom line: I suspect Technorati, and anyone else who takes this up, should offer an (optional) “scheme” field in their tag search capability, which would be handy for those who care and invisible for those who don’t.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Grrrr - I hate not having the time to write the post I want to write on this, but here goes…
Tags are labels attached to things. This procedure is absolutely orthogonal to whether professionals or amateurs are doing the tagging.
Professionals often think tags are covalent with folksonomies because their minds have been poisoned by the false dream of ontology, but also because tagging looks too easy (in the same way the Web looked too easy to theoreticians of hypertext.) Not only are tags amenable to being used as controlled vocabularies, it’s happening today, where groups are agreeing about how to tag things so as to produce streams of e.g. business research.
More importantly, tags are not the same as flat name spaces. The LiveJournal interests list, the first large-scale folksonomy I became aware of (though before the label existed) is flat. The interest list has one meaning: Person X has Interest Y, included as part of in List L. All L is attached to X, and all Y’s are equivalent in L.
Tags don’t work that way at all. Tags are multi-dimensional, and only look flat, in the way Venn diagrams look flat. When I tag something ‘socialsoftware drupal’, I enable searches of the form “socialsoftware & drupal”, “socialsoftware &! (and not) drupal”, “drupal &! socialsoftware”, and so on.
Hierarchy is a degenerate case of tags. If hierarchy floats your boat, by all means tag hierarchically. If I tag so that A &! B returns no results, and a search on A alone returns the same items as A & B, then A is a subset of B at the moment.
This last point is key — the number one fucked up thing about ontology (in its AI-flavored form - don’t get me started, the suckiness of ontology is going to be my ETech talk this year…), but, as I say, the number one thing, out of a rich list of such things, is the need to declare today what contains what as a prediction about the future. Let’s say I have a bunch of books on art and creativity, and no other books on creativity. Books about creativity are, for the moment, a subset of art books, which are a subset of all books.
Then I get a book about creativity in engineering. Ruh roh. I either break my ontology, or I have to separate the books on creativity, because when I did the earlier nesting, I didn’t know there would be books on creativity in engineering. A system that requires you to predict the future up front is guaranteed to get worse over time.
And the reason ontology has been even a moderately good idea for the last few hundred years is that the physical fact of books forces you to predict the future. You have to put a book somewhere when you get it, and as you get more books, you can neither reshelve constantly, nor buy enough copies of any given book to file it on all dimensions you might want to search for it on later.
Ontology is a good way to organize objects, in other words, but it is a terrible way to organize ideas, and in the period between the invention of the printing press and the invention of the symlink, we were forced to optimize for the storage and retrieval of objects, not ideas. Now, though, we can scrap of the stupid hack of modeling our worldview on the dictates of shelf space. One day the concept of creativity can be a subset of a larger category, and the next day it can become a slice that cuts across several categories. In hierarchy land, this is a crisis; in tag land, it’s an operation so simple it hardly merits comment.
The move here is from graph theory (arrange everything in a tree graph, so that graph traversal becomes the organizing principle) to set theory (sets have members, and the overlap or non-overlap of those memberships becomes the organizing principle.) This is analogous to the change in how we handle digital data. The file system started out as a tree graph. Then we added symlinks (aliases, shortcuts), which said “You can organize things differently than you store them, and you can provide more than one mode of access.”
The URI goes all the way in that direction. The URI says “Not only does it not matter where something is stored, it doesn’t matter whether it’s stored. A URI that generates the results on the fly is as valid as one that points to a disk.” And once something is no longer dependent on tree graph traversals to find it, you can dispense with hierarchical assumptions about categorizing it too.
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January 23, 2005
Posted by Clay Shirky
To respond to David’s question about folksonomies Aren’t we going to innovate our way out of this? My answer is yes, but only for small values of “out.” A big part of what’s coming is accepting and adapting to the mess, instead of exiting it.
Seeing people defend professional classification as a viable option for large systems is giving me horrible flashbacks to the arguments in 1993 about why gopher was superior to the Web. Gopher was categorized by professionals, and it was hierarchical. Gotta love hierarchy for forcing organization. You can’t just stick things any old place — to be able to add something to a hierarchy, you have to say where it goes, and what it goes with, next to, under, and above. And if you do it right, you can even call it an ontology, which means you get to charge extra. (I loves me some ontologies.)
The Web, meanwhile, was chaos. Chaos! You could link anything to anything else! Melvil Dewey would plotz if he saw such a tuml. How on earth could you organize the Web? The task is plainly impossible.
And you know what? The gopher people were right. The Web is chaos, and instead of getting the well-groomed world of gopher, we’ve adapted to the Web by meeting it half way.
...continue reading.
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Posted by David Weinberger
I have a question for Liz and Clay. (Each of the sentences in the next paragraphs should be taken as an assumption of mine that need questioning.)
People tag either so they can find stuff or so that others can. (A non-exclusive “either/or”, of course.) The homogenizing of meaning that Liz so brilliantly points to works against both goals. E.g., let’s say del.icio.us tells me that the most popular tag for Powerline.com is “republican.” If I am a Republican, that tag isn’t going to sufficiently differentiate for me the clumps of my bookmarks. Likewise, if I really want that page to be found by others, a tag as generic as “republican” ensures it will be ignored in the Niagara of pages with that tag. Won’t those irritations rub the lamp sufficiently to summon the genius of the market?
For example, as Liz points out, social networks can help get relevant results out of folksonomies; tags and folksonomies are already intersecting social networks, as at Flickr,. And a table of synonyms that’s compiled manually and/or automatically by doing clustering analysis can enable us to tag local but search global. Or if generalized tag sets emerge (and I think they will, albeit not truly globally), we can use them as well as our local tags. For example, if a tag set called “AmeriTag” emerges, we could tag a photo as [ameritag:hotdog food_eating_contest obscene_idiots], where the second tags are purely our own. (Namespaces to the rescue!)
Aren’t we going to innovate our way out of this? I agree with Clay that we’re paddling a kayak in a stream that can’t be stopped. But are we really kayaking over the falls? Isn’t it more like the Nile that, overflowing its banks, fosters emergence? (And can I stop with the river metaphors now? :)
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January 22, 2005
Posted by Clay Shirky
Liz’s fantastic posts on folksonomy (one, two) detail the new issues we’re facing or will face around folksonomic organization. In the first post, though, she takes on my earlier argument about the economic value of folksonomy, saying
Clay argues that detractors from wikipedia and folksonomy are ignoring the compelling economic argument in favor of their widespread use and adoption. Perhaps. But I’m arguing that it’s just as problematic to ignore the compelling social, cultural, and academic arguments against lowest-common-denominator classification. I don’t want to toss out folksonomies. But I also don’t want to toss out controlled vocabularies, or expert assignment of categories. I just don’t believe that all expertise can be replicated through repeated and amplified non-expert input.
I don’t believe that either, so I want to re-state my views on the subject.
I believe that folksonomies will largely displace professionally produced meta-data, and that this will not take very long to happen. However, I do not think that folksonomy is better than controlled vocabularies or expert judgment, except for completely tautological definitions of ‘better’, where the rise of folksonomy is viewed as prima facie evidence of superiority. This is not the position I take.
If I had to craft a statement I thought both Liz and I could agree with, it would be that technology always involves tradeoffs among various characteristics in a particular environment. She goes on to list some of those characteristics, including especially the risks from lowest-common-denominator classifications. So far, so sympatico.
Here’s where I think we disagree. She thinks economic value is another of the characteristics to be traded off. I think economic value is the environment.
Put another way, I don’t think it matters what is lost by not having professionally produced metadata in any environment where that is not an option anyway, by virtue of being priced out of the realm of possibility.
So when she says I am urging an uncritical acceptance of folksonomies, she is half right. I am not in favor of uncriticality; indeed, in the post she references, I note that well-designed metadata is better than folksonomies on traditional axes of comparison.
But she’s right about the ‘acceptance’ half. It doesn’t matter whether we “accept” folksonomies, because we’re not going to be given that choice. The mass amateurization of publishing means the mass amateurization of cataloging is a forced move. I think Liz’s examination of the ways that folksonomies are inferior to other cataloging methods is vital, not because we’ll get to choose whether folksonomies spread, but because we might be able to affect how they spread, by identifying ways of improving them as we go.
To put this metaphorically, we are not driving a car, with gas, brakes, reverse and a lot of choice as to route. We are steering a kayak, pushed rapidily and monotonically down a route determined by the enviroment. We have a (very small) degree of control over our course in this particular stretch of river, and that control does not extend to being able to reverse, stop, or even significantly alter the direction we’re moving in.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
I got an email from Alex Pang at the Institute for the Future, asking about the future of social software, which response I started by writing about the value of the term in the recent past. (I’ll post my predictions for the future under separate cover.) This is in a way a continuation of the conversation started about social software as a term, kicked off last fall by Chrisopher Allen’s history and definition of the word.
Alex’s questions were Where do you think social software will be in ten years? Will it be the foundation of a discrete category of applications or services? Will social software-like capabilities be built into other software? Will the whole concept be as outdated as a KC and the Sunshine Band album?
Yes, in 10 years, the phrase will be outdated. We won’t need it anymore because the value of social interaction will be folded into a large number of applications, sometimes as built-in features, sometimes as external services that get integrated in the manner of web services.
Looking back, the phrase ‘social software’ has served three functions. First, it called attention to an explosion of new work that was otherwise seemingly unrelated: at first glance, del.icio.us isn’t like Meetup isn’t like Socialtext. The label made it both possible and fruitful to examine those similarities, and to imagine how applications like those might be combined or extended.
...continue reading.
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Posted by Ross Mayfield
This is a lengthy rant where I suggest that Cornucopia production can be realized not just through cooperation in developing a resource, but building upon success in governing each other as peers while in the act.
Tagging Napster
What do Napster and Wikipedia have in common? Both had or have rapid growth with value created by users. But what's fascinating is how this value was generated from personal and social incentives.
Dan Bricklin's classic 2000 essay (yes, anything written in 2000 that stands the test of time to 2004 can be deemed a classic), Cornucopia of the Commons, provided a framework with three ways of building a valuable database: Organized Manual (e.g. Yahoo), Organized Mechanical (e.g. Altavista) and Volunteer Manual (e.g. Slashdot)
Napster provided incentives for users to contribute organized content and a simplified UI where creating the copy in the shared music directory can be a natural by-product of their normal working with the songs. Bricklin defined this as a Cornucopia of the Commons, where Use brings overflowing abundance.
This is in contrast to Garrett Hardin's 1968 classic The Tragedy of the Commons:
Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit -- in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.
Back in 2000, around when Ev wrote his 2000th post, he pointed out: There should be a payoff to the user for entering accurate information. Specifically he noted that HotorNot's ratings didn't provide any incentive for accurate photo data.
By now you can probably guess that tagging is a Volunteer Manual construct that leverages Commons-Based Peer Production with incentives for accurate information. Creating bad labels hurts your own organization and lessens your group benefit when you want to pivot on the global view of the tag. What Flickr demonstrates is not only adoption growth, but the creation of a database that scales socially.
Keep reading...
...continue reading.
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January 20, 2005
Posted by Liz Lawley
Seems my post on folksonomic flaws is getting a lot of reading. Now that I’ve had a chance to sleep on it, and read other people’s comments (including the del.icio.us annotations, which I often find interesting—given only a line or two to comment, what will people pull out?), I’ve had a few more thoughts on the issue.
One of the things that I’ve tried to emphasize every time I’ve talked to people involved with search engines is the growing uselessness of ranking algorithms that take the search and linking habits of the whole world into account. I don’t want to know what the average eight-year-old calls an image. I want to know what my friends and colleagues call an image. Or a link. Or a photo.
Flickr and del.icio.us work so well for me not because they aggregte the world’s tags, but because they allow me to aggregate my social network’s tags, links, and photos. I don’t want to see everybody’s links on productivity, but I do want to see Merlin Mann’s. I don’t want to see everybody’s links on blogging, but I do want to see danah’s. I don’t want to see “research” resources from a molecular biologist, but I do want to see them from a sociologist studying online social networks.
Seb alludes to this is in his response to my piece. We need multiple ways to get at content. Global tagging and aggregation is great if you’re a non-expert trying to find resources on a subject where you don’t know the jargon. But what I want are tools that let me tap into my trusted network. That’s why the del.icio.us inbox is such a beloved tool, and it’s why I suspect that far more people on Flickr look at photos from their contacts than photos from everybody.
It takes me back to voice and authority again. This is why anonymous wikis are inherently problematic for me. It matters to me who wrote something. The more specialized your information needs, the more important trust and reputation and authority become. And while I value collective authority and reputation, in most information-seeking contexts I value it more when that collective is one that I’ve chosen, or that has self-selected around a specific topic or concern.
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Posted by Liz Lawley
So, if my del.icio.us inbox is any indication, the blogosphere has been abuzz lately with opinions and commentary on “folksonomy.” It’s interesting stuff, no doubt, especially for those of us who come to social computing from a library and information science background.
Unfortunately, too many of the paeans to tagging that I’ve read have completely ignored some of the key social and cultural issues associated with public and collaborative labeling of content, opting instead for a level of technology-driven optimism that I see as overly naive. I think folksonomy has incredible value—the two web sites that I use most heavily right now are Flickr and del.icio.us. And I understand that this is something that can’t be stuffed back into the bottle. Nonetheless, I don’t think that means we have to accept it with an uncritical eye, or adopt every new implementation of tagging without consideration.
...continue reading.
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January 14, 2005
Posted by David Weinberger
Technorati, a site that indexes 4.5 million weblogs, is now enabling us to sort blog posts by tag. This is way way cool. In fact, it marks a next step in the rapid evolution of the tagging economy. [Disclosure: I am on Technorati’s Board of Advisors. But I would have been excited about this anyway.]
...continue reading.
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January 13, 2005
Posted by Ross Mayfield
Inclusive:
Technorati just launched Tag Search across blogs, Flickr, del.icio.us and Socialtext wikis. Here's a zeitgeist and a search for social software tags.
How It Works
Their implementation goes beyond the concept of Taggle and implementation of Taggregator to break down social silos in some fascinating ways.
Scraping Flickr and del.icio.us tags seems to be the easy part. They also infer tags from blog post categories in major blogging platforms like Blogger and Typepad. You can also include a tag within a post with a simple rel="tag" statement added within an html link, like this indicatr. Socialtext added rel tags to its categories enable open discovery of tagged wiki pages.
But as tagging goes global, its a good time to consider even more why tagging and folksonomy work.
Networked Individualism
What Flickr and del.icio.us do really really well is provide both personal and social incentives for participation, which fits the networked individualism model. People are not bound to a single group or themselves alone, they are the center of a network that ebbs and flows through multiple communities with different facets of their identity. You own your photo collection or bookmarks and tag them first for your own benefit. The individual incentives are strong for collection, and the interface for tagging lowers barriers to doing so. Group incentives for sharing, such as attention, feedback, implcit reputation and group forming itself encourage meaningful classification.
Emergent Intelligence
There are strong similarities to how wikis and tagging works. Tagging lowers transaction costs for contributions and fixing mistakes. This increases participation and the probability of the right data actually existing in the first place. It also enables a dedicated community to self-govern (and note that as in the case of Wikipedia, the enthusiasm hasn’t worn off)
A single tag can be applied in error, and be fixed locally, but that matters less when viewed in the aggregate. Larger patterns arise that are statistically significant.
The other day I was listening to an interview with Malcom Gladwell about his book Blink, which posits that snap decisions are better than carefully considered judgements. Especially when made by experts who have developed a muscle memory of the brain. One of the callers pointed out (at 9:00/30:15) we are better than making snap decisions work better at discrimination (does it belong in the good category or the bad category) between things than characterization (determining the nature of things). Fine, I thought, that's tagging.
Gladwell's theories seemed to run counter to those of another popular book these days, The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, which holds that group decisions are better than those of individual experts. But not only are these two views complimentary, Surowiecki and Gladwell are having an open conversation about it this week.
So just think about the emergent intelligence mechanism we are creating with a neural network overlaid on the net. Considered blog posts gain authority through link attention. Consensual wiki pages gain authority over time. Links and snapshots bridge across places, physical and virtual. Tags are applied in the blink of an eye and patterns emerge from the crowd.
Social Discovery
But below all that global heady stuff, what tags do really well is aid social discovery. Technorati's tag search may be disconcerting at first, it plugs structural holes between clusters in ways usually left to people as boundary spanners. Facets of identity may be impacted by context shifting. But social software services are adapting to support context within group forming. On Flickr, you have friends and family privacy with the social network as a filter. On Socialtext, you have private spaces defined by the group of participants. The open affordances of tags have led to local/global/local navigation and easy group forming. But the same opennes raises interesting questions about tag spam and the tyranny of the majority.
UPDATE: Technorati’s official launch
Full Disclosure: Technorati is a customer of Socialtext and I have lots of friends who work there. I also happen to think this is very cool stuff.
Tags: socialsoftware, tag, folksonomy, flickr, technorati, socialtext, del.icio.us.
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Posted by Kevin Marks
The CBS memos case known as 'Rathergate' has been picked over for months in the blog world, so it was a bit of a surprise to me that only now have CBS issued their report.
When told that the memos were fake, Rather said "If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I'd like to break that story." He is thinking of a story he can put EXCLUSIVE on. But whom would he be excluding? Presumably other big media organisations.
More reflective journalists, such as Dan Gillmor, are instead thinking how they can put INCLUSIVE on their stories - they are measuring success by how many people they bring into the conversation, and they recognise it doesn't necessarily start with them.
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January 12, 2005
Posted by Seb Paquet
No Taggle just yet, Clay, but getting closer: the Taggregator, which generates a side-by-side view of recent del.icio.us and flickr input with a given tag. Try pattern. (via Alan Levine)
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January 10, 2005
Posted by Ross Mayfield
Our very own Clay and danah in a Wired News piece on Wikipedia Growing Pains.
“One of the mysteries of scale is that there’s no such thing as scaling well,” said Clay Shirky, who writes about culture, media and technology. “You can make something 100 times bigger, and if it works, you think you’ve got it licked. But the next power of 10 can kill it. So I don’t know whether or not openness and co-creation are incompatible at Wikipedia scale.”
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January 8, 2005
Posted by danah boyd
In response to Clay, i definitely do not believe that Wikipedia should be ignored and i definitely do not believe that Britannica is better - just different. When i said that Wikipedia will never be an encyclopedia, i am definitely referencing the current definition (although being flexible on the fact the definition does state book form). Whether the definition will expand, who knows but i don’t think it matters. Both encyclopedias and Wikipedia are knowledge resources and they will always be different. If legitimacy requires a definitional change, i’m worried. Why does it have to be an encyclopedia? Why can’t it simply be Wikipedia?
In this (long) entry, i want to make 3 points:
1) A vetted Wikipedia can have complementary value;
2) Reflexivity would be of great value for entries that interpret (not necessarily for entries that are about empirical facts);
3) Authority has to do with knowledge, investment and risk.
...continue reading.
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Posted by Ross Mayfield
In the context of the Wikipedia debate, Clay asserted that trust and authority are social facts. What is worth your attention is increasingly a social fact as well.
Part of the debate is really just media literacy in an evolving landscape, but it also centers on the institutionalization of authority. Institutionalism in sociology holds, as the name implies, that institutions shape our social fabric greater than any other factor. What may be new is the pace at which greater connectivity develops and challenges institutions.
The curious thing about trust, though, is that it is a social fact, a fact that is only true when people think it is true. Social facts are real facts, and have considerable weight in the world….Ebay has become trustworthy over time because the social fact of its trustworthiness grew with the number of successful transactions and with its ability to find and rectify bad actors…Like trustworthiness, authority is a social fact, though authorities often want to obscure this. A PhD is an authority figure because we all agree that the work that goes into getting a doctorate (itself a social fact) is a legitimate source of authority.
So, under what conditions might the Wikipedia become a kind of authority, based on something other than authorship or brand? And the answer to that question, I think, is when enough people regard it as trustworthy, where the trust is derived from the fact that many eyes have viewed a particular article.
Perhaps the neutral point of view ethic of Wikipedia may make attention a viable indicator, but as Clay goes on to explore, other dimensions such as edits and longevity may be better proxies for trust. Andrew Lih revealed edits are the most reliable metric (pdf). But as Wikipedia is increasingly cited, putting aside if it should be or not, metrics for citation networks will have increasing relevancy.
Wikis and blogspace have different approaches for determining what is important. In blogspace, links guide attention which can accrete authority. But controversy and error draws attention and can disinflate authority. This is in stark contrast with wikis, where the goal of your writing is to be ignored — to write for permanence in future edits rather than attention to your Permalink.
...continue reading.
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January 7, 2005
Posted by Clay Shirky
There’s a post by Louis Rosenfeld on the downsides of folksonomies, and speculation about what might happen if they are paired with controlled vocabularies.
…it’s easy to say that the social networkers have figured out what the librarians haven’t: a way to make metadata work in widely distributed and heretofore disconnected content collections.
Easy, but wrong: folksonomies are clearly compelling, supporting a serendipitous form of browsing that can be quite useful. But they don’t support searching and other types of browsing nearly as well as tags from controlled vocabularies applied by professionals. Folksonomies aren’t likely to organically arrive at preferred terms for concepts, or even evolve synonymous clusters. They’re highly unlikely to develop beyond flat lists and accrue the broader and narrower term relationships that we see in thesauri.
I also wonder how well Flickr, del.icio.us, and other folksonomy-dependent sites will scale as content volume gets out of hand.
This is another one of those Wikipedia cases — the only thing Rosenfeld is saying that’s actually wrong is that ‘lack of development’ bit — del.icio.us is less than a year old and spawning novel work like crazy, so predicting that the thing has run out of steam when people are still freaking out about Flickr seems like a fatally premature prediction.
The bigger problem with Rosenfeld’s analysis is its TOTAL LACK OF ECONOMIC SENSE. We need a word for the class of comparisons that assumes that the status quo is cost-free, so that all new work, when it can be shown to have disadvantages to the status quo, is also assumed to be inferior to the status quo.
The advantage of folksonomies isn’t that they’re better than controlled vocabularies, it’s that they’re better than nothing, because controlled vocabularies are not extensible to the majority of cases where tagging is needed. Building, maintaining, and enforcing a controlled vocabulary is, relative to folksonomies, enormously expensive, both in the development time, and in the cost to the user, especailly the amateur user, in using the system.
Furthermore, users pollute controlled vocabularies, either because they misapply the words, or stretch them to uses the designers never imagined, or because the designers say “Oh, let’s throw in an ‘Other’ category, as a fail-safe” which then balloons so far out of control that most of what gets filed gets filed in the junk drawer. Usenet blew up in exactly this fashion, where the 7 top-level controlled categories were extended to include an 8th, the ‘alt.’ hierarchy, which exploded and came to dwarf the entire, sanctioned corpus of groups.
The cost of finding your way through 60K photos tagged ‘summer’, when you can use other latent characteristics like ‘who posted it?’ and ‘when did they post it?’, is nothing compared to the cost of trying to design a controlled vocabulary and then force users to apply it evenly and universally.
This is something the ‘well-designed metadata’ crowd has never understood — just because it’s better to have well-designed metadata along one axis does not mean that it is better along all axes, and the axis of cost, in particular, will trump any other advantage as it grows larger. And the cost of tagging large systems rigorously is crippling, so fantasies of using controlled metadata in environments like Flickr are really fantasies of users suddenly deciding to become disciples of information architecture.
This is exactly, eerily, as stupid as graphic designers thinking in the late 90s that all users would want professional but personalized designs for their websites, a fallacy I was calling “Self-actualization by font.” Then the weblog came along and showed us that most design questions agonized over by the pros are moot for most users.
Any comparison of the advantages of folksonomies vs. other, more rigorous forms of categorization that doesn’t consider the cost to create, maintain, use and enforce the added rigor will miss the actual factors affecting the spread of folksonomies. Where the internet is concerned, betting against ease of use, conceptual simplicity, and maximal user participation, has always been a bad idea.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
[Ed. Note: Jake wrote such a long and thoughtful comment responding to my post of yesterday on the Wikipedia and authority that I wanted to re-post it as an entry, with comments and trackbacks of its own.
I have re-formatted it to use box-style quotes and expanded some acronynms, but changed none of the substance. -clay ]
Clay writes:
Picking up on yesterday’s theme of authority, the authority of, say, Coleridge’s encyclopedia was the original one: authority derived from the identity of the author. This is like trusting Mom’s Diner, or the neighborhood tailor — personal reputation is worth preserving, and helps assure quality.
The authority of Britannica, by contrast, is the authority of a commercial brand. Their sales are intimately tied into their reputation for quality, so we trust them to maintain those standards, in order to preserve an income stream. This is like trusting Levis or McDonald’s — you don’t know the individuals who made your jeans or your french fries, but the commercial incentive the company has in preserving its brand makes the level of quality predictable and stable.
Jake comments:
Yes, but a brand is some sort of an ethereal thing. [I think a ‘not’ was dropped, as in “… not some sort of ethereal thing.” — ed] It is a symbolic representation of a product or the underlying institution that created it. Trademark rights are common law in nature and they attach through use.
So while it is true that at some level this sort of structure is a reification, in practical terms its role in building trust must be considered. To me this is really the core of the concerns about Wikipedia. Is the structure adequate to the task of establishing something authoritative enough to be useful.
...continue reading.
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January 6, 2005
Posted by Clay Shirky
Tom glosses himself, coming up with a pithier and more example-driven definition of social software:
Social Software can be loosely defined as software which supports, extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message-boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
There was another point of danah’s I wanted to respond to, but yesterday’s post had gotten quite long enough, and in any case, I had a slightly different take in mind for this, including a LazyWeb request at the end, relating to this image:
danah says “Wikipedia appears to be a legitimate authority on a vast array of topics for which only one individual has contributed material. This is not the utopian collection of mass intelligence that Clay values.” This misconstrues a dynamic system as a static one. The appropriate phrase is “…for which only one individual has contributed material so far.”
Wikipedia is not a product, it is a system. The collection of mass intelligence that I value unfolds over time, necessarily. Like democracy, it is messier than planned systems at any given point in time, but it is not just self-healing, it is self-improving. Any given version of Britannica gets worse over time, as it gets stale. The Wikipedia, by contrast, whose version is always the Wiki Now, gets better over time as it gets refreshed. This improvement is not monotonic, but it is steady.
...continue reading.
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Posted by Ross Mayfield
I have this pet theory, rather grand, and falls into the category of what you believe is true even though you cannot prove it. That open source will realize the end of history.
In 1989 Francis Fukuyama wrote the celebrated and controversial book, The End of History, which posited that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a Hegelian triumph of liberal democracy as the last remaining form of government and political philosophy. Fukuyama went on to explore issues of social capital and tyhmos, “desire for recognition” that drives free-market economics. His critics were manifold, particularly those on the wrong side of history. Marxist criticism centered less on liberal politics than liberal economics — particularly market failure. The classic debate over the role of government centers on what economists call market failure: when the market fails to provide social goods.
Similar to how Doc says the demand side is supplying itself, with open source and open content social goods are produced through peer production. Let’s explore one aspect that is less about code and more about social dynamics triumphing over economics, language. For a small country like Rwanda, a localized version of Office would never be supplied, so they do it themselves. Some vendors are open sourcing their localization in recognition of unevenly distributed demand. While more research is required, some patterns emerge with stories behind them when comparing language support by markets and peers:
...continue reading.
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Posted by Ross Mayfield
Jon Udell calls 2004 The Year of the Enterprise Wiki, or at least when Enterprise Wiki stopped sounding like an oxymoron. I happen to think this year is the big one, but that’s my job. Jon looks to the future:
As the Wiki phenomenon enters its second decade, it’s hard to predict just how the technology will evolve. Two things seem certain: Wiki culture will continue to thrive, and enterprise users will continue to seek lighter, easier collaboration tools.
Jon also discovers the marriage of wikis and folksonomy. Socialtext has been tagging since early 2003, before Flickr and del.icio.us took it in great directions, we just call them categories.
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January 5, 2005
Posted by Clay Shirky
My response to danah’s response about the Wikipedia/anti-elitism debate:
First, some background. I have the same “yes, but” reaction over and over to Wikipedia detractors — much of what both Sanger and boyd say is wrong with the Wikipedia is wrong with it, but then there’s this incredible leap from “The site as it stands has faults” to “…and so it must be ignored or radically altered.”
Reading pieces like Sanger’s, I feel like I’m being told that bi-planes fly better than F-16s because F-16’s are so heavy. You cannot understand how well things fly without understanding both weight and thrust.
It’s a similar leap to assume that, since the Wikipedia has disadvantages relative to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Britannica must therefore be better. The real question is “Weighing the advantages and disadvantages of the Wikipedia against the advantages and disadvantages of Britannica, under what conditions is Britannica better, and under what conditions is Wikipedia better?”
...continue reading.
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Posted by danah boyd
As Ross noted earlier, there is gossip in the air that Six Apart will acquire LiveJournal. I’m concerned about the cultural effects of this, some of which i’ve addressed in a rather verbose entry entitled The Cultural Divide Between LiveJournal and Six Apart. This may be of interest those of you invested in cultural maintenance of social sites.
I’ve turned off comments here so that they can be connected with the entry itself.
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Posted by danah boyd
I’m never quite sure when some of my more random posts are of value to Many-To-Many readers so i don’t always post everything here. That said, i’ve written three entries as of late concerning Last.FM and i think that collectively, they may be interesting:
- music networks (from apophenia - 12/29/04)
- music genres and moods (from apophenia - 12/31/04)
- Music-Driven Networking (from Operating Manual - 1/5/05)
I discuss issues such as the role of music in social networking software, tagging in connection with moods, and how publicly visible behavior data results in behavior changes.
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January 4, 2005
Posted by Ross Mayfield
Six Apart is acquiring LiveJournal, according to Om Malik. The result is the largest blog vendor, and a fairly independent one at that.
LJ is a web scale hosted service at 5.6M users, with 1.4% generating $2.325M/yr. 6.5 million users combined, or blogspace is 40M users including bloggers and readers, possibly if you assume the Pew study, but that would be 80% of blogspace when you stick journalspace in the peanut butter. And all this stuff is growing.
Follow along with this watchlist (RSS)
Update: It’s official, 6A/LJ Press Release, Mena’s Mood: Optimistic, Brad’s Mood: Excited, Six Apart Interview
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Posted by Kevin Marks
Jennie's post on how her boys and girls play an online role-playing game differently:
... it’s been just as interesting to watch how the girls’ reaction to the game. After the boys became obsessed with it, the girls had to try it. They’ve all got their own files (accounts), but they do completely different things in the game. They’re also not as obsessed, asking to play far less frequently. When Kailee plays, it’s usually to walk around and meet people or to accomplish a specific goal. Today, she met King Arthur and Lancelot, and she’s trying to save Merlin. She’s not interested in armor or fighting, but rather she likes solving puzzles, exploring, and talking with others. Whereas the boys talk in the game in order to accomplish something, boast, or trade insults, Kailee will talk to someone just to meet them (which was a whole other parental discussion we had with both kids). While it’s a generalization within a game that has thousands and thousands of players, the girls definitely aren’t in it to fight.
reminded me of Richard Bartle's classic paper on the four kinds of MUD player:
Labelling the four player types abstracted, we get achievers, explorers, socialisers and killers. An easy way to remember these is to consider suits in a conventional pack of cards: achievers are Diamonds (they're always seeking treasure); explorers are Spades (they dig around for information); socialisers are Hearts (they empathise with other players); killers are Clubs (they hit people with them).
Can we map these to blogs and other social software too? Traffic seekers, knowledge seekers, friend seekers and spammers?
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Posted by Nancy White
Lars Hasselblad Torres of AmericaSpeaks, shares this fantastic grid of Technologies for Online Public Engagement (PDF). Entitled “Approaches to Online Public Engagement”, the grid summarizes 17 organizations that offer tools for online public engagement. Some are familiar, like Weblab. Others are unique tools developed by local and national government.
One question I had for Lars was an indication of the underlying technologies offered — all they all home grown or based on commercial or open source products? Lars thought most were homegrown. If you know more, I’d love to know more! Likewise, Lars says he’d love feedback on any parts of the chart. He can be found at lhtorres at americaspeaks.org
As I scan the chart, I can’t see some of the emergent technology efforts I hear about from folks like Jon Lebkowsky. CivicSpace Labs, and the work that Jerry Michalski and co are doing at Yi-Tan. With a little thinking, I’m sure others comes to mind. I suspect this is because these folks have not been oriented specifically towards online consultations which is a very specific online interaction domain. They have been more in the activist domain.
That said, I sense there is a lot of opportunity bridging between the two domains.
[Also posted at Full Circle]
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Posted by Nancy White
Lisa Kimball just pointed me to a networking award her company, GroupJazz, has created in honor of online networking pioneer Frank Burns. Act now: the 2005 deadline is January 7th!The Group Jazz Meta Networking Award in honor of Frank Burns: “We have established the Meta Networking Award to honor Frank and to carry on the work he started in the way he taught us to do it. We hope that this award can play a small part in making the power of networking media available to people and organizations who might not otherwise be able to take advantage of it to leverage their goals.
Each year we will make at least one award to an organization or project that is committed to doing something aligned with the original mission of The Meta Network - closing the gap between the human condition and human potential. The selected organization or project will receive a full year of consulting, services, and access to online media and other tools to enable them to design, launch and implement a network that can play a key role in supporting their purpose. Our goal will be to help the network be self-sustaining by the end of the award year.”
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Post at brianstorms about federated folksonomies a la del.icio.us and flickr, with an image-as-thought-experiment that sums up the idea neatly:
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Posted by Clay Shirky
As if on cue, I got a pointer from Joseph Reagle to his recent paper on the Wikipedia. It’s a fascinating piece, largely concerned with disagreement and dispute resolution among participants, but relative to the current debate about the Sanger piece, this bit of history jumped out at me:
Wikipedia is the populist offshoot of the Nupedia project started in March of 2000 by Jimbo Wales and Larry Sanger. Nupedia’s mission was to create a free encyclopedia via rigorous expert review under a free documentation license. Unfortunately, this process moved rather slowly and having recently been introduced to Wiki, Sanger persuaded Wales to set up a scratch-pad for potential Nupedia content where anyone could contribute. However, “There was considerable resistance on the part of Nupedia’s editors and reviewers, however, to making Nupedia closely associated with a website in the wiki format. Therefore, the new project was given the name ‘Wikipedia’ and launched on its own address, Wikipedia.com, on January 15 [2001]”
Wikipedia proved to be so successful that when the server hosting Nupedia crashed in September of 2003 (with little more than 23 “complete” articles and 68 more in progress) it was never restored.
The idea of a Wikipedia, but vetted, runs aground on the simple math of relative growth. The ‘filter, then publish model’ of Nupedia, for all its considerable virtues, is simply inadequate to deal with rapid growth (only 23 articles completed!). The characteristics of the Wikipedia’s success are in its ability to grow with minimal constraints, even when that means that the whole is a work in progress.
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Posted by danah boyd
[In direct response to various points in Clay’s K5 Article on Wikipedia Anti-elitism which responds to Larry Sanger’s Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism]
First, let me acknowledge that i have excessive privilege in this lifetime. That said, i’m not convinced that academia operates solely on an aggressive exertion of privilege nor am i convinced that any institution in the United States can be discussed without an assertion of privilege. But that’s another story.
I would argue that many librarians, teachers and academics fear Wikipedia (not dislike it) because it is not properly understood, not simply because it challenges their privilege, just as most new systems and media are feared by traditionalists of all sorts. Have we not had enough conversations about blog fear amongst journalists?
As a contributor to and user of Wikipedia, there is no doubt that i have a deep appreciation for it. All the same, i roll my eyes whenever students submit papers with Wikipedia as a citation. This is probably a source of much Wikipedia dislike amongst academics.
Wikipedia appears to be a legitimate authority on a vast array of topics for which only one individual has contributed material. This is not the utopian collection of mass intelligence that Clay values. For many non-controversial topics, there are only a limited authors and we have no idea what their level of expertise is. Hell, i submitted a bazillion anthropology entries while taking Anthro 1 based on my textbook and most of them remain untouched. My early attempts to distill anthropology should definitely not appear as legitimate authorities on the topics, yet many students take them as such.
On topics for which i feel as though i do have some authority, i’m often embarrassed by what appears at Wikipedia. Take the entry for social network: “A social network is when people help and protect each other in a close community. It is never larger than about 150 people.” You have got to be kidding me. Aside from being a patently wrong and naive misinterpretation of research, this definition reveals what happens when pop cultural understandings of concepts become authorities.
I have extreme respect for those who seek to define concepts such as those who craft the dictionary and encyclopedias. It is extremely challenging to define a term because you are trying very hard to capture and convey excessive amounts of information in an abbreviated fashion that cannot be misinterpreted. This takes talent, practice, precision and a great deal of research. Consider, for example, the difference between a good science writer and a bad one. Not everyone can convey large bodies of research in an easily accessible manner.
This does not mean that i dislike Wikipedia, just that i do not consider it to be equivalent to an encyclopedia. I believe that it lacks the necessary research and precision. The lack of talent and practice mostly comes from the fact that most entries have limited contributers. Wikipedia is often my first source, but never my last, particularly in contexts where i need to be certain of my facts. Wikipedia is exceptionally valuable to read about multiple sides to a story, particularly in historical contexts, but i don’t trust alternative histories any more than i trust privileged ones.
My concern - and that of many of my colleagues - is that students are often not media-savvy enough to recognize when to trust Wikipedia and when this is a dreadful idea. They quote from it as though it cannot be inaccurate. I certainly distrust many classic sources, but i don’t think that an “anti-elitist” (a.k.a. lacking traditional authority and expertise) alternative is automatically better. Such a move stinks of glorifying otherness simply out of disdain for hegemonic practices, a tactic that never gets us anywhere.
I don’t believe that the goal should be ‘acceptance’ so much as recognition of what Wikipedia is and what it is not. It will never be an encyclopedia, but it will contain extensive knowledge that is quite valuable for different purposes. If the fuss dies down, i’d be exceptionally worried because it would mean that we’ve lost the ability to discuss the quality of information.
Alternatively, i too would love to see a vetted version of Wikipedia, one that would provide a knowledge resource that is more accountable and authoritative.
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January 3, 2005
Posted by Clay Shirky
Slashdot has a roundup of criticism of the Wikipedia, including a pointer to a Kuro5hin article by Larry Sanger, a co-founder of the Wikipedia, making three strong criticisms of the Wikpedia as it stands.
The first criticism is that the Wikpedia lacks the perception of acccuracy:
My point is that, regardless of whether Wikipedia actually is more or less reliable than the average encyclopedia, it is not perceived as adequately reliable by many librarians, teachers, and academics. The reason for this is not far to seek: those librarians etc. note that anybody can contribute and that there are no traditional review processes. You might hasten to reply that it does work nonetheless, and I would agree with you to a large extent, but your assurances will not put this concern to rest.
This analysis seems to be correct on the surface, and at the same time deeply deeply wrong. Of course librarians, teachers, and academics don’t like the Wikipedia. It works without privilege, which is inimical to the way those professions operate.
This is not some easily fixed cosmetic flaw, it is the Wikipedia’s driving force. You can see the reactionary core of the academy playing out in the horror around Google digitizing books held at Harvard and the Library of Congress — the NY Times published a number of letters by people insisting that real scholarship would still only be possible when done in real libraries. The physical book, the hushed tones, the monastic dedication, and (unspoken) the barriers to use, these are all essential characteristics of the academy today.
It’s not that it doesn’t matter what academics think of the Wikipedia — it would obviously be better to have as many smart people using it as possible. The problem is that the only thing that would make the academics happy would be to shoehorn it into the kind of filter, then publish model that is broken, and would make the Wikipedia broken as well.
Sanger’s second complaint is about governance:
Far too much credence and respect accorded to people who in other Internet contexts would be labelled “trolls.” There is a certain mindset associated with unmoderated Usenet groups and mailing lists that infects the collectively-managed Wikipedia project: if you react strongly to trolling, that reflects poorly on you, not (necessarily) on the troll. If you attempt to take trolls to task or demand that something be done about constant disruption by trollish behavior, the other listmembers will cry “censorship,” attack you, and even come to the defense of the troll.
This complaint is right, I think, inasmuch as it hits the core problem of Wikipedia (and of social software generally), namely governance. How do you take a group of individuals who disagree and get them to co-create, and to agree to be bound by a decision-making process that will assure that no one gets everything they want? And how do you also make that system open?
However, Sanger gives Wales and the Wikipedia contributors too little credit here, I think. Governance is a certified Hard ProblemTM, and at the extremes, co-creation, openness, and scale are incompatible. The Wikipedia’s principle advantage over other methods of putting together a body of knowledge is openness, and from the outside, it looks like the Wikipedia’s guiding principle is “Be as open as you can be; close down only where there is evidence that openness causes more harm than good; when this happens, reduce openness in the smallest increment possible, and see if that fixes the problem.” Lather, rinse, repeat.
You can see this incrementalism in the Wikipedia crew’s creeping approach to limiting edits — not allowing edits on the home page, paragraph level edits on long articles, etc. These kinds of solutions were deployed only in response to particular problems, and only after those problems were obviously too severe to be dealt with in any other way.
This pattern means that there will always be problems with governance on the Wikipedia, by definition. If you don’t lock down, you will always get the problems associated with not locking down. However, to take the path Sanger seems to be advocating — lock down more, faster — risks giving up the Wikipedia’s core virtue. The project may yet fail because there is no sweet spot between openess and co-creation at Wikipedia scale. But to lock down pre-emptively won’t be avoiding that failure but accelerating it.
Sanger’s final point, that the Wikipedia is anti-elitist, is quite similar to his first complaint. Yes, it is impossible for experts on a subject to post their views without molestation but that’s how wikis work. It’s certainly easy to imagine systems where experts are deferred to mechanically. Much of the world, including, significantly, the academy, works that way. But if you want a system that works that way, you don’t want a wiki, and if you want a wiki, you won’t get a system that works that way.
In place of ordained expertise, my guess is that the Wikipedia will move further towards a ‘core group’ strategy, where there will be increasing separation of powers between committed and casual users, and the system will gain a kind of deference, not for expertise (a fairly elusive quality that Sanger invokes but never defines)
It’s been fascinating to watch the Kubler-Ross stages of people committed to Wikipedia’s failure: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Denial was simple; people who didn’t think it was possible simply dis-believed. But the numbers kept going up. Then they got angry, perhaps most famously in the likening of the Wikipedia to a public toilet by a former editor for Encyclopedia Brittanica. Sanger’s post marks the bargaining phase; “OK, fine, the Wikipedia is interesting, but whatever we do, lets definitely make sure that we change it into something else rather than letting the current experiment run unchecked.”
Next up will be a glum realization that there is nothing that can stop people from contributing to the Wikipedia if they want to, or to stop people from using it if they think it’s useful. Freedom’s funny like that.
Finally, acceptance will come about when people realize that head-to-head comparisons with things like Britannica are as stupid as comparing horseful and horseless carriages — the automobile was a different kind of thing than a surrey. Likewise, though the Wikipedia took the -pedia suffix to make the project comprehensible, it is valuable as a site of argumentation and as a near-real-time reference, functions a traditional encyclopedia isn’t even capable of. (Where, for example, is Britannica’s reference to the Indian Ocean tsunami?)
The Wikipedia is an experiment in social openness, and it will stand or fall with the ability to manage that experiment. Whining like Sanger’s really only merits one answer: the Wikipedia makes no claim to expertise or authority other than use-value, and if you want to vote against it, don’t use it. Everyone else will make the same choice for themselves, and the aggregate decisions of the population will determine the outcome of the project.
And 5 years from now, when the Wikipedia is essential infrastructure, we’ll hardly remember what the fuss was about.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
I’ve admired Manuel Kiessling’s marvelous A Really Simple Chat (ARSC) program since I saw Greg Elin using it as conference support back in 2002. Greg and I played around with it some more that fall for a small social software conference, adding some features specific to backchannel support (detailed in In-Room Chat as a Social Tool.)
Now Manuel is beta-testing 3.0 of ARSC, and it’s got a lot of native support for backchannel features — there’s a specific ‘in room chat’ room, with Jerry Michalski’s ‘red card/green card’ system built in. There is also a defult ‘Display’ user (beta login ‘Display’, passwd ‘arsc’) whose view of the chat is optimized for projection or plasma screen by boosting the font size and dropping the input features.
He’s also added user levels and two-level moderation, along with a number of other new features.
The goal, says Manuel, is to “…make it possible to set up a digital backchannel in under 2 minutes, without any dirty hacks.” You can play with the beta version on his site, or install your own.
As always, the advantages of ARSC are its ability to circulate access to a chat via URL, which is often simpler than getting people to download special software for irc., and allows a variety of strategies for inclusivity and exclusivity.
I still have some LazyWeb requests for ARSC. The main one is to be able to turn the current message post-processing tool into a full-fledged Atom feed, to make it easier to archive, monitor, and even bridge between ARSC and irc.
I’d also like to see some sort of ‘scroll-speed’ setting, where, when there are more than a dozen or so interjections in a minute, the later comments are pre-cached and roll out on the screen at some specified maximum pace, rather than the earlier comments flying off the screen. When things get crazy, make the machines do the work, not the people…
And Manuel has registered inroomchat.org as well — nothing there yet, but he says he’s going to “…set up a wiki there for all things social software/in-room chat/digital backchannel.”
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Posted by Liz Lawley
The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a new report on blogging (PDF) yesterday, with some remarkable numbers:
By the end of 2004 blogs had established themselves as a key part of online culture. Two surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in November established new contours for the blogosphere: 8 million American adults say they have created blogs; blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users; 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online; and 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs. Still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is.
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January 1, 2005
Posted by Clay Shirky
Good piece by Adam Mathes, Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata:
Perhaps the most important strength of a folksonomy is that it directly reflects the vocabulary of users. In an information retrieval system, there are at least two, and possibly many more vocabularies present (Buckland, 1999). These could include that of the user of the system, the designer of the system, the author of the material, the creators of the classification scheme; translating between these vocabularies is often a difficult and defining issue in information systems. As discussed earlier, a folksonomy represents a fundamental shift in that it is derived not from professionals or content creators, but from the users of information and documents. In this way, it directly reflects their choices in diction, terminology, and precision.
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