InformationDynamics

Last week I drove down to south Austin to visit with Tom Parish and had a very nice conversation about the SXSW panel, and all things related, and maybe even a few tangents. Tom’s got a great studio setup, and so the quality of this recording is phenomenal, even with the earth-moving equipment in the background (you can really only hear the low rumbling at the end of the session.)

After we stopped recording, Tom and I continued talking for a while. One piece of sage advice that he gave about blogging in general was to break the topics into smaller slices that people can really get a handle on. If you’ve read my blog, you know that I can try to cram way too much stuff into a single post. This is relevent because this podcast does a bit of the same thing, but hopefully in a more digestable form. Listen as if viewing an impressionistic painting rather than a blueprint, and I think the experience will be much more enjoyable. It was very nice to have the conversational framework to explore these ideas, and I will be posting about some of them in more detailed slices in the coming week. I’ll also do more to show how these ideas tie together to form a more cohesive mosaic in my mind.

- David

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I love the idea of giving tags dimensionality and depth. Emanual Quintarelli writes about faceted tags and Folksonomies 2.0. Somebody stop me before I fall down the rabbit hole. I just started tracking some links, starting in Emanual’s blog entry above, I followed it to Peter Van Dijck’s blog, in which I found this great presentation of his on the semantic web. That presentation has some great historical links to some conversations that happened back in November of 2003. I’ll stop with the linking, but what is clear, is that because I’ve only come into this in the past year, I’ve missed out on some of the great foundational dialog that has gotten us here.

There ought to be an online course on folksonomies just to get people up to speed on what can be done, and what we might want to be done. The idea of dimensionality of tags needs further explorations. If I tag something as Austin, should this be interpreted as a place or a person? Either way, what is the next level up or down in disambiguation? Along the place axis (dimensionality), I would like to zoom in or zoom out (scale).

Another idea is to be able to be able to incorporate and designate synonyms. For example, SouthCongress and FarWest could be place-based synonyms for inAustin, which is downscale from inTexas.

I can hear it now: why would we want to burden anyone with having to specify this much detail? Right? How about making it optional, and something that can be added later by another user. This additional detail doesn’t have to be added all at once by one user.

I’ll have to think more about faceted or dimensional tags. But I do want to mention one more issue that I discovered while digging through that great presentation of Peter’s. Clay Shirky writees about semantic syllogism, and claims that because not much of the data that we deal with lends itself to this kind of structure, the semantic web will not be useful. (Remember that this is over two years ago.) Deductive linking is a very specialized kind of structural form, but very useful if it can be used. I’m going to go out on limb and say that folksonomies are more inductive than deductive, and much more messy as a result. We don’t want to squash the messy creativity of bottom up meaning  making by enforcing top-down rules, but we also don’t want to get rid of the more rare case when top-down structure is applicable and useful.

I think we’ll find ways for top down and bottom up to play nicely together and intertwine in increasingly pleasing ways.

What I’d really like is a way to dump this huge armload of links I just discovered into a hopper that allowed me to sort and cross-link them for my own benefit, and then share that. How did I discover all of this? Can del.icio.us just hoover it all up and notice the implicit links and let me add to them?

Sorry, I haven’t provided the dimension-based tags into my flights of fancy, so, probably, not many will follow me through this particular maze of ideas. Bummer.

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For those eager souls who keep a daily eye on the official SXSW site, you’ll notice that they’ve posted times for the panels. Beyond Folksonomies was originally shown as scheduled for 3:30 to 4:30 pm. We’ve now been moved to 10:00 - 11:00 am on Saturday. The SXSW site should reflect this change shortly.

This change will allow attendees interested in both our panel and the James Surowiecki presentation a chance to see both. My recommendation is to take advantage of this opportunity. Just make sure to get to the convention center early.

Another benefit of this schedule move will be the opportunity for the Beyond Folksonomies panel to host a lunch for those attendees interested in continuing the discussion. Details to follow.

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If you’re looking to understand where we as panel members are coming from, it’s hard to overstate the significance of the stuff from the Wisdom of Crowds. In addition to the links that David shared about the topic, you might also want to check out James’ presentation from ETech 2005 which is worth a listen on your MP3 player.

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