Webnote Happy’s a bookmark manager that lets you store the URL, title, and a description for a web page. You can also hit a hotkey (Cmd-Shift-D) to create an entry for the frontmost window/tab in Safari. It’s aware of Net News Wire, so you can set it as the ‘weblog editor’ and bookmark items in the feeds you’re reading.

You can incrementally search the contents of the title and description fields, which enables you to do a sort of ‘tagging’ of entries.

I like being able to stash away links without pumping the data up to my weblog or del.icio.us stream. So it complements, rather than competes with Buzz’s Cocoalicious.

Webnote Happy’s a Core Data application, so it stores the link database as XML in ~/Library/Application Support/WebnoteHappy/WebnoteHappy.webnotes. The enterprising scripter should have no trouble grabbing that file, and using it to generate Atom entries, or cUrl commands.

Things that jumped out at me

• “Classes of errors unrelated to the mode of production.”
• “Who can categorize?” Everyone, at least everyone you care about.
• Tagging is an ongoing operation: not something that happens in the cataloging department once and for all time

I missed the first 15 minutes of the talk because I was coming up from Cupertino to Fort Mason.

Classification and it’s Discontents

• 1000 to 10000 items in a kitchen
• not everything is labeled however
• items hard to ‘see inside’ are labeled since a can of tomatoes weights the same as can of chickpeas

Seeing ‘inside the can’ is magnified in the library

• classification systems roll up
• how do systems adapt

• 200 Dewey Religion

  • fine grained for Christianity,
  • but everything else is shoved in 290
  • Seattle’s library directly reflects the dewey classification system it’s a continuous ramp.

• Library of Congress, a bigger namespace

  • Balkans, Asia, and Africa are given equal ‘weight’ in the scheme
  • Not designed to be biased
  • Design was an optimization for the number of books on each area
  • History gotcha: category DK still covers everything in the former Soviet Union
  • Re-shelving costs prohibit exploding the category.

• How do you history-proof this?

Books aren’t inspect-able, you need labels.

• Yahoo

  • Originally a list of links
  • Then they needed lists of lists soon after.
  • Hired a staff ontology.
  • Pointers: under entertainment, books and literature are a pointer to a node in the tree under humanities
  • They still needed to add the shelf back in.

• Google

  • Dispense with the shelf
  • Look at what points at what.
  • Only the links are what’s ‘real’.
  • They bought DMOZ, the open source version of Yahoo.

What Has Been Lost

• What is a fertility symbol?

  • Venus of Willendorf
  • Is it a ‘magical object’ or just porn?
  • We can’t read it.

• Several examples of things we don’t ‘read’ any more.

  • Ancient writing and calculating systems (Rongo Rongo, Linear A, etc.)
  • Hieroglyphs were almost lost as a written language until we found the Rosetta Stone
  • Three different scripts: common Egyptian, Hieroglyphs, Greek

• Degeneracy

  • More than one way to do things.
  • If you lose one
  • Christopher Alexander: the city is not a tree, on city planning
  • Cities are degenerate in the sense they have overlap.
  • The world’s non-convex.

• A question of economics: is the money spent on classification systems worth the money?

  • you current system may be a future person’s rosetta stone

• Flickr

  • something happens, I go look for it on Flickr
  • type in “mermaid parade”
  • thousands of photos, hundreds of photographers
  • everyone tags photos with “mermaidparade”
  • no coordination, no ontologies, no hierarchies
  • relations and clusters allow you to determine the parade’s on Coney Island in Brooklyn

• oh and del.icio.us too

  • “linksys router”
  • “making a paper airplane”
  • “CSS vista”
  • different distribution of tags — some things have consensus others float at the interaction

• Oh hell, RDF

  User asserts Tag describes Photo

  User asserts Tag describes Website

Information Architecture is Social Architecture

• tagging systems exist in a flat namespace

  • no sense of hierarchy
  • take three random LJ users
  • hierarchy is a second order effect of tagging

• tag clouds over time example

  • • Social Quakes: communities of practice
  • JJG’s article on Ajax grows a tag cloud asserting it’s about “AJAX”

Clay’s Questions

• how can tagging identify communities of practice
• how should we handle the thesaurus problem
  • you have to get off the ‘thesaurus bus’ (gay politics is not “gay agenda”)
• can we apply this to navigation
  • the VP wants a link
• what, if anything, should we do about popularity risk
  • overwhelming other voices
• can we detect “concept rot”
  • the “Ajax” tag adoption curve
  • things that die start to stink
• what can we do about spam
  • we will face a well-funded and

Q&A

• Attention tracking — when people stop tagging
• Latent Semantic Analysis augmented with intelligence: Mechanical Turk
• Links age and die
  • help find links that are broken and save them from the caches (Archive.org, Google)
  • RSS feeds are a latent resource for preserving content (on all those copies of NNW and FeedDemon)
  • what’s the germ line?
• The whole distribution matters
  • the top five tags have the social weight
  • the rest drive the ecosystem
  • internal shelves: noise or other ‘communities of practice’
• how does tagging deal with factions
• how does tagging deal with spam
  • edit wars — that thesaurus problem
  • bump up the relative frequencies of the top five tags
  • return of metatag spam
  • watching obscure tags
  • friends of friends tag clouds?
• on Wikipedia
  • classification systems aren’t as important
  • tagging is the first great post search interface
• associative clustering is how biological memory works, is the web thinking (Kevin Kelly)
  • we don’t know how we think
  • it’s more of a tool than a brain
• anything from history that would had predicted the importance of tagging?
  • we knew that hierarchical systems were brittle
  • usenet: rec.pets.cats — attractors for other things, including flamewars as antagonists have the usenet subject (cats, SF) in common (Cynthia’s LMB list)
• how do we forget things we don’t ‘remembered’?
  • don’t want a global delete button
  • Stewart Brand’s “You Own Your Own Words” policy caused a storm on Well
  • But you can’t take back a public discussion, other people heard it and may not want to forget it
  • don’t want to accidently lose data either (I thought you were blogging this?)
  • Stewart relates the experience of the “delete everything I said” button
    • also happens on LJ
  • DRM makes things hard to remember (don’t have the magic software/hardware dongles)
  • Conversations are downloaded
• how to add stink to software?
  • institutional fallbacks
  • a golden month to find in global and local caches
  • resource allocation
• storage is free, what’s the cost of preservation?
  • falling storage cost increases the problem
  • there’s more
  • real options theory, how much to pay to postpone a decision
  • the 90 year window after which, stuff becomes interesting to us — if storage costs are low, easier to keep stuff over that bridge
  • the tag cloud also makes it easier to find the old stuff and the time series is of interest to itself
• digital isn’t durable yet, when is it a solved problem?
  • it’s a wicked problem
  • only local solutions
  • always a social layer
  • a fork b/w open and closed culture — Times Direct
  • attack vectors for opinion: Wingnut Daily is free, Times Direct isn’t. Guess what’s linked.

That said, I do think most XML editing tools are pretty awful (and if you don’t spend the time to make them useful for your content model, they are even more awful – but that’s a problem for the implementer) – they just about work when you’re editing existing content but almost all of them are really annoying when doing content creation.

Building useful XML editing tools for non-gearheads remains a difficult problem, and I’m wondering if document authoring will end up going to variants of DITA, DocBook, Open Document, and plain-old XHTML, abandoning custom schemas and DTDs out of exhaustion.

ETA: the Dojo Toolkit people have a working in-browser editor.

People don’t tag multiples: Using tags like folders is like drawing Venn diagrams with no overlapping circles — possible, but so destructive of the value of the system as to make the effort pointless. — Clay Shirky

Analogies

LC subject headings apply as many as are appropriate for later retrieval

Tagging’s an overloaded operator

• later retrieval
• collaboration
• publicizing
• categorization
• hard to get people’s head wrapped around the idea

Technical barriers

• People don’t know about pinging for indexing.
• Using feedburner to automate pinging
• You have to understand RSS, search, pings and the rest of the Web 2.0 technologies
• Hard to get photo sharing users to cognitive shift
• Need a tagging tool for HTML adverse writers. Blummy a good approach.
• IE7 restrictions on bookmarklets.
• Tagging UI’s intimidating Furl’s sucks, but not intimidating
• LJ shift from memories to tags confused and angered users

Functional tagging

• Flickr and Technoratti tags for publicizing
• Tags for retrieval
• Gutenberg Project around tagging
• Tagging gap – economic/cultural
• Portablity of attention data
• emotional tagging
• snark tagging

Power dynamics

• Maintaining privilege — you’re not Glenn Reynolds, Xeni Jardin, or Atrios, how do you get heard.
• iTunes sharing in workplaces — selective sharing to establish idendity, then the boss looked in, and everyone shut up.
• the universe of taggers is full of young white men
• tagusablity for these conversations

ETA Marshall wrote with a corrected attribution to the ‘venn diagram’ quote. Thanks!

Why?

In Mark Pilgrim’s world of the future, where your web browser does more than just display HTML documents, it means that when you want to add a site to your aggregator, your aggregator wouldn’t look for an Atom feed. Instead it’d parse the site using an hAtom filter (XSLT, JavaScript, DOM, XQuery) and pull the content into the aggregator’s database.

Um, sorta like what services such as Feedfire do already.

The XML version of Atom would become your aggregator’s format for sharing feed data.

In the examples, the editorial content, or description, of the review was inside a blockquote element, which didn’t make sense to me since as a reviewer, you’re not quoting yourself.

Ryan explained that any tool consuming hReview will be looking for the fields, which are identified by class attribute values, not the element. So div is a legal wrapper element for the description as long as you identify it as the description by adding class="description".

There also some XSLT stylesheets for extracting data out of microformats:

• hReview to RDF
• hCal to iCal
• hCard to vCard

Tonight I remembered that Jo Walsh talked about a similar project: tagging London using RDF at OSCON back in 2003.

Elliot Rusty Harold and Simon St Laurent have been blogging the conference in full. Here’s the presentations that grabbed me so far.

• ERH showed us a tool, written in Java, for ofuscating an instance of XML so you can send it to someone as a test case without revealing confidential information. This was a hit, with several people suggesting additions. He put a sheet down in the coffee break area where we could write suggestions.
• Examplotron, Eric van der Vlist’s tool for generating Relax NG schemas from annotated references, influenced a couple of presentations:
  • Angelo Di Iorio described design patterns for document structures. They motivated their argument with an overspecified model of an address that didn’t fit ‘real word’ instances.
  • Ken Holman showed us a second generation of an XSLT 1.0 stylesheet that produces a stylesheet from an annotated example of an instance document.
• A couple of presentations on Topic Maps and RDF that went right over my head. Both were about trying to reconcile one to the other.
• Matthijs Breebaart from the Dutch Tax Authority showed off a system his group built to describe bits of law and regulation (i.e. the chapter and paragraph) in XML. From there you transformed it into a URI. His department was able to get the commerical publishers (who produce the online versions of law and regulation) to sit down and agree on a common URI format. The benefit of the exercise: his customers have a common way to get to the online documents and commentaries without needing to dive down into each vendor’s website.
• Ann Wrightson taught us some Situational Semantics, that is, under what conditions do human or machine interpretations of observations make sense. She left a challenge: one of Shakespere’s sonnets translated into Klingon, with markup in Tengwar. Under what situation does this document make sense?
• C. M. Sperberg McQueen gave a math lecture. Brzozowski derivatives, an algebra of regular expressions, give you nice way to generate validators without building state machines.

Tomorrow, we get the presentations on overlaps. This is one of the “elephants in the living room” that Tommie Usdin, one of the co-chairs, warned us about in the introduction. The spectre of Ted Nelson will haunt Extreme 05.

My experience so far confirmed my theory that Extreme is the Potlatch of XML conferences. Small, a little clubby (but self concious of this, and people do take the time to say hello,) presentations above the ‘beginner’ level, and one main track of programming.

And the food in Montreal? C’est bon. C’est bon.

He started with WordPress, and was asked to try out Moveable Type too. Now he’s set up Moveable Type, WordPress, S9Y, and Textpattern.

I’m interested in his opinion because I’m weighing moving this weblog to one of those systems, or moving everything to Live Journal where I have a permanent account.

One of the nice features on the site are a few JavaScript-driven tools for creating markup for hReview, hCalendar, and hCard.

Even if you’re not familiar with Tinderbox, it’s worth a read.

The genesis of the method was in a couple of exercises where we were given collections of nodes in a Tinderbox hypertext and asked to group them. It was easy enough to assign a keyword to a node once you’ve searched on a term, but he wanted a way to assign new keywords without clobbering ones already there.

Categorizing after you’ve collected some data ought to reduce the problem where you create taxonomy as you add entries, and wind up with an explosion of categories: see this weblog and del.icio.us for examples.