AOL and Dojo

Several engineers(*) at AOL had a very interesting meeting with the Dojo guys last week.  One of the results is the announcement that AOL is hosting the Dojo toolkit on our content distribution network.  The reason this is great is because the major barrier to adoption of DHTML/Ajax/etc UIs is, honestly, the download times for the Javascript code; you only pay this once but it's a major concern.  The CDN helps enormously with this since it does automatic compression, caching, intelligent routing, proper browser bug workarounds, etc.  If enough people adopt this, it would be a win for everyone (only the first application to require a library module pays anything, the rest get it for 'free').

I hope we'll be able to do some more interesting things and help contribute to Dojo as well.

(*) OK, technically I'm a manager, but they let me wear the engineer hat sometimes.

Another One on Tagging: Data on Folksonomies

This folksonomies article is good for the questions it raises, but also for the data it collects in one place -- lots of good statistics on del.icio.us and flickr usage of tags in this paper:

Folksonomies: Tidying Up Tags?
"This article looks at what makes folksonomies work. The authors agree with the premise that tags are no replacement for formal systems, but they see this as being the core quality that makes folksonomy tagging so useful. The authors begin by looking at the issue of "sloppy tags", a problem to which critics of folksonomies are keen to allude, and ask if there are ways the folksonomy community could offset such problems and create systems that are conducive to searching, sorting and classifying. They then go on to question this "tidying up" approach and its underlying assumptions, highlighting issues surrounding removal of low-quality, redundant or nonsense metadata, and the potential risks of tidying too neatly and thereby losing the very openness that has made folksonomies so popular." Commentary by Marieke Guy and Emma Tonkin, UKOLN. [D-Lib Magazine]

(You gotta hand it to the old-school Digital Library people.)

Why Tag?

One of the questions that keeps coming up in discussions about tagging is whether private tagging is useful and if so, how?  Is public tagging really the important application to keep in mind and if so, why?  By private tagging, I mean someone applying tags but not sharing them with anyone -- so they're useful for personal organization but not for sharing with others.

Empirical evidence suggests that tagging is most useful when public and shared.  But why, exactly?  Caterina Fake, in a panel at Syndicate, noted that people on Flickr get to "ride free" on top of compulsive categorizers.  I think this is certainly part of it, and maybe tagging is good occupational therapy too, but I have a gut feel there's more to the story.

My fifteen month old son is an inveterate tagger.  His tag cloud looks something like this at the moment (somewhat elided):

airplane água ana bird book bulldozer bus bye choo-choo-train dada dog down mama phone tractor truck up wow

...which I know because he tags things repeatedly and excitedly, especially when someone else is around.  And I think this is the key point -- this is a natural behavior, and a social one.  (He'll talk to himself, but it's really second best -- he wants to share his view of the world with other people!)  And of course it's accompanied by pointing -- the original hyperlink.

That's as far as I've gotten.  Fortunately, Rashmi Sinha, in A social analysis of tagging, does a great job of analyzing exactly how tagging facilitates social interactions.  Go read it.  Also, read her earlier cognitive analysis of tagging as well.  Both great forays into the "whys" of public tagging.

I think this all suggests that private tagging might be useful in the same way that talking to yourself might be useful (yes, sometimes, but not a primary use case).  More interesting is social-but-private where you share with a limited number of people; this is more difficult to do well than either totally private or totally public; is it valuable?  How?  When?