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July 28, 2005
Posted by Ross Mayfield
Ever notice that SmashedTogetherWords, like you find in some wikis, can be queries of a machine code culture? Try people's names: clayshirky, danahboyd, sebpaquet, lizlawley, davidweinberger and rossmayfield on Google, or the same on Technorati. Try with other Pronouns and even more than nouns and you discover the emerging culture. Or maybe just a byproduct of blunt tagging and usable urls. Anywho, maybe it's better spaced out, but this is higher quality metadata.
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July 25, 2005
Posted by Kevin Marks
Jeff Jarvis called for decentralised tags and restaurant reviews, and Stowe Boyd posted some ideas about how to achieve this.
Unfortunately, Stowe misunderstood how the existing open, decentralised tagging model works, and went off into a design dead-end because of this.
Stowe confuses the tagspace linked to (which provides the context for the meaning of the tag), with the services that can index the tag. These are completely independent. You can link to Technorati, your own site, Wikipedia or anyone who provides a tagspace with a URL that ends in the tag you want - for example:
<a href="http://www.corante.com/getreal" rel="tag">Get real</a>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/decentralisation" rel="tag" >decentralisation</a>,
<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Stowe Boyd" rel="tag" >Stowe Boyd</a>
which displays as:
Get real decentralisation, Stowe Boyd.
This will tag this post with 'getreal', 'decentralisation' and 'Stowe Boyd', while providing informative links on each tag.
Similarly, anyone can index the tags provided this way. They are open and loosely coupled. Technorati indexes all links with rel="tag" on as tags, independent of which site they link to. We designed the spec that way from day one to avoid lock-in, and encourage adoption. When he says "If I want to get today's Technorati to work, I still need to create URLs that are Technorati specific", he is completely wrong.
Stowe then spends a lot of space worrying about the problem of where he links to, as if this is set in stone at the time of posting. This is not just premature optimisation, it's optimising for a nonexistent problem. Because you control your own data on your own blog, if you later decide to link to a different tagspace, you can change your own links; you don't need an elaborate and fragile RSS hybrid with mandated behaviour to do so. The choice of tagspace is an important one, but I would contend that Technorati's page that collates posts from anyone that uses that tag in a blog, and also on photo and like services like Flickr, Buzznet, del.icio.us and Furl is more open than a solipsistic category on your own site. However, if like Humpty-Dumpty, you decide that "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less", you can use your own personal tagspace to clarify this.
Owning your own data is the key point.
The microformats model is to encode common data formats in XHTML so you can put the data on your own blog, and multiple tools can take advantage of it. Your data can travel inside webpages, feeds, and anywhere else HTML, RSS, Atom, or any future XML format can go, without having to build elaborate new infrastructure to make it work.
Adding new specialised RSS-only feeds for this, and requiring indexers to poll them, as Stowe suggests, is far more work than adding rel="tag" to a few links, and little bits of extra work like that don't get done - after all the sidebar link to my posts on this blog still shows an error after 10 months here (note: use the W3C link checker to easily find such problems).
Doing things openly is more work than building a proprietary site to edit your data, but we think ti is worth the benefits. Lets look at the example of tagging restaurant reviews that both Jeff and Stowe mention.
The microformat way to do this is to use hReview, an open standard for publishing reviews. I missed Stowe's original post because I was down on the coast on Friday, so here's a review of the restaurant I had lunch in:
0.2 Wonderful seafood, workmanlike ambience Jul 22, 2005 by Kevin Marks business ★★★★★ Phil's is tucked away in between the docks and the beach in Moss Landing, where it gets first pick of the fish landed there each day, and cooks up delicious fresh seafood dishes that would cost 3 times as much in SF. Resolutely unostentatious, you order food by lining up at the cash register, and while you can sit outside, the seats face the power station opposite the front, rather than the beach at the back.
Technorati and other comprehensive blog indexers will pick up the 'seafood','fish', 'outside' and 'Moss Landing' tags from that and associate them with this post, but a specialised service looking for reviews could see them in the context of the 'hreview' class, and use the more structured rating data to make more sense of it.
It would be easier to build a closed restaurant rating service that required you to come to it to fill in and store your reviews, but it is easier and better for independent publishers to own their own data.
Stowe, I'm glad you're interested in Open Tagging, and I hope I've explained it better now. Do come along to Tag Tuesday's July meeting tomorrow 6:30pm - 9:30pm at 77 Natoma Street in SF and talk to me and other Open Tagging developers about it (yes, that event is a microformat too).
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all."
Technorati Tags: Open Tags, tagtuesday, technorati
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July 23, 2005
Posted by danah boyd
Rule #1 for studying social culture: pay attention to the sex and drugs.
When it was reported that Orkut is being used as a drug networking tool in Brazil, my immediate response was duh.
I have interviewed subjects who distributed cocaine in Baltimore via Friendster. (To my knowledge, they were never caught which makes it different than the situation with Orkut.) Other subjects have told me ways to find drugs on Tribe.net and MySpace. Obviously, i am not willing to disclose how or who. But this is definitely not unique to Orkut nor to social networking in general. For example, in college, people used to buy drugs on eBay.
Give people the ability to distribute information and they will distribute drugs. Tis just as obvious as if you give people access to attractive people, they will date. So, i find it very entertaining that people get up in arms about this.
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July 20, 2005
Posted by David Weinberger
Tom Coates does some analysis to illustrate what he suggests is a cultural difference in how people use tags. Some use tags as folders to house objects, others use them as descriptions of objects. (And, it seems to me, many of us do both.) His example: If you tag an URL as “blogs,” you are collecting blogs into a virtual folder. If you tag an URL “blog,” you are describing it as an example of a blog. In the first case, you’re probably putting blogs aside so you can read them. In the second, you may be researching the blog phenomenon. Tom’s research leads him to conjecture that “the folder metaphor is losing ground and the keyword one is currently assuming dominance.”
I assume this is correlated to blogging for myself and blogging to add to the social tagstream: I tend to folder for myself and to keyword when contributing to a social tagstream
It’s all very confusing. Fortunately, Tom is a good explainer…
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July 19, 2005
Posted by Paul B Hartzog
A darkened theatre. A full house. A heroic act. A mighty roar from the crowd. This is the delight of good cinema.
I love going to the movies with people, even people I don’t know. I love to hear others’ reactions, and discuss the movie with people afterwards. In fact, I love it so much, that when my neighbor shows movies in many languages from all over the world in his backyard on Saturday nights during the summer, I often go down for the movie and end up enjoying the wine, cheese, and conversation more than the images flickering across a bedsheet waving gently in the breeze.
So, I got to thinking: What if you could rent a theater for a night? Then I read this: “At this year’s Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, filmmaker David LaChapelle screened his new hi-def movie, Rize, by streaming it from Oregon and then transmitting it through a WiMax station in Salt Lake City. It worked flawlessly - soon even theaters won’t have to rely on physical media anymore” (from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.04/start.html?pg=2).
Improvements in bandwidth and compression will usher in the possibility of streaming movies directly to local theaters.
...continue reading.
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July 18, 2005
Posted by danah boyd
I’ve been waiting for a mega-media company to buy MySpace and sure enough, it happened. News Corp bought Intermix Media (the half-parent of MySpace). Unlike the other YASNS, the value of MySpace comes from the data on media trends that is the core of what people share on that service. You have millions of American youth identifying with media and expressing their cultural values on the site. Marketers who want to understand the constantly shifting youth trends are often looking for a perch from which to be the ideal voyeur. And with MySpace, they found it. Here, youth are sharing media left right and center and forgetting that they are doing so under the watchful eye of Big Media who are certain to use this to manipulate them. Because youth believe that MySpace is a social tool for them, they are not conscious of how much data they’re giving to marketers about their habits.
Really, it’s a brilliant move for News Corp. (assuming they can stay out of the courts and that the RIAA is nice to them). I’m just not so certain how good it is for youth culture.
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July 8, 2005
Posted by Ross Mayfield
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July 4, 2005
Posted by Ross Mayfield
wikiHow is one of the more interesting cases of opening a proprietary content and community site. A couple of entrepreneurs bought eHow (editorially produced How To Guides, a dot com showcase) out of hock and appended a wiki to it. Today it may be the second fastest growing public wiki and they recently adopted Creative Commons licensing. The real story is the process of opening an asset, transitioning a community and how to be a net-enabled entrepreneur.
During the boom, eHow spent $30 million, developed a rich base of How To content, respectable traffic an loyal contributors-as-users. Many of these contributors were experts in their fields and valued how they could contribute content while retaining copyright. Under a questionable business model, eHow filed for bankruptcy in February 2001, but traffic continued at 250k visitors per month. Another now defunct internet company called IdeaExchange.com purchased eHow, but also was unable to run the site profitably and began to look for buyers.
Two entrepreneurs who happened to love the site, bought the asset and worked part time to keep the site operational. Literally, it is a nights and weekend labor of love.
They leveraged Internet Archive to find an republish lost content during the bankruptcy and published 1,000 articles previously composed by the dot com's professional editors. But noting the parallel between the Nupedia/Wikipedia story, they looked to evolve the user-generated content model. One of them happened to be a Socialtext customer (was the first deal I closed via Skype, incidentally) for their day job, so I've been helping them out informally.
They adapted the open source MediaWiki to fit the eHow format by breaking the wiki page into title, summary, steps, tips and warnings. With zero publicity, they simply stuck a wikiHow tab on the top of the site. wikiHow is six months old and has already generated 1400 articles (by comparison, Wikitravel, a great resource, generated 1000 articles in seven months) and traffic is doubling every three months.
The very first piece of advice I gave was to focus on the social contract and adopt Creative Commons licensing. They executed the social contract (in human readable summary: a civil group effort, family content and limit egregious self-advertising) quite well, but licensing proved to be an issue.
A big part of the co-founding intent was to share and develop the asset with the community. Unfortunately, we don't have an analytical framework for opening intellectual property (like we do with transaction cost analysis for buy vs. build). The co-founder decisions were further complicated by the existing community structure. Many eHow contributors were considered experts in their fields. They valued the ability to retain copyright on their work as a promotion of their expertise. On the other hand, while the site purposely shied away from publicity, it began to attract another generation of contributors more familiar with Creative Commons licensing.
It also attracted some detractors, such as Ernie Miller:
Yeah, except that, unlike Wikipedia, their Wiki isn't under the GNU Free Documentation License. In other words, they're basically asking people to slave away for them for free. Thanks, but no thanks.
The Open License Proposal provides some good detail on the narrative of adopting Copyleft. Most of the conversation on open licensing occurred within the wikHow discussion board. One key issue was the risk of screen scrapers and spammers bastardizing content for search engine optimization. I put them in touch with Creative Commons and Mia Garlick (General Counsel) provided compelling arguments and guided them through the process. At a certain point, they were able to gain support from the existing eHow community. Now at the bottom of every wikiHow page you will find the (CC) logo and This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
No better way to conclude this story, for now, with co-founder Jack H's own words in an email:
I’m very happy to report that wikiHow has rolled out a Creative Commons license over the entire site. Our small but growing community had a long discussion about which license to choose and why. As you may remember, Josh and I had originally proposed giving authors the ability to opt-in or opt-out of an open license. And the community liked the idea of the open license, but the majority of the participants wanted the open license to be mandatory rather than optional. So Josh and I wisely decided to follow their lead. And after hearing their views, it is now obvious that they (and you) were right. It just didn’t make sense for wikiHow to be half free. The most active community members work on the entire site, not just their own articles and therefore they should have the satisfaction of knowing that everything they do can be used by anyone under the terms of the license. I’m very excited to have made the switch to this license. I know that I will be really proud the first time I hear about a blogger or school using our content on their website or other publication. Offering free, helpful instructions to the problems of everyday life is wikiHow’s core mission and the open license will help us get these instructions in the hands of even more people. I’m really stoked.
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July 1, 2005
Posted by Ross Mayfield
During the SARS epidemic I noted that a Wikipedia page was the best source of information for an evolving event. Now three bloggers have launched a new experiment in collaborative problem solving in public health, The Flu Wiki. They hope the wiki will be:
- a reliable source of information, as neutral as possible, about important facts useful for a public health approach to pandemic influenza
- a venue for anticipating the vast range of problems that may arise if a pandemic does occur
- a venue for thinking about implementable solutions to foreseeable problems
What can you and two of your friends start to change the world?
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