SXSW

Posts inspired by interactions at SXSW

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xFolk: Iteration in Response to Comments

Readers raised several useful issues with the first iteration of the microformat. This new iteration addresses those issues. Further comment is appreciated.

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This post is somewhat of an insider's post. I am assuming you have read and are following with interest the xFolk topic I started here.

After some feedback from Thomas Vander Wal and Tantek Çelik, it appears that xFolk is going to require some iterations. There were eight issues with the initial proposal:

  1. My creative use of the rel attribute might be hard to get accepted (several issues here)
  2. How would uses of attribute values in xFolk mix in with other microformats. In particular, what would I do if my uses of the an attribute collided with other uses?
  3. It would be nice to constrain attribute value terms before they are used. People expect to know possible attribute values before they are used. Listing them in the XMDP after they are used breaks standard web processing models.
  4. In xhtml (and to some extent generally in xml), attribute values tend not to contain user data. Tags are best considered user data.
  5. Regardless of whether one agrees with the prior point, people prefer that user data be contained in elements for the practical reason that it is more visible that way and therefore less likely to be a spam attempt.
  6. It would be nice if a more direct tie could be made between this microformat and people's current practices with link blogs and exporting their del.icio.us entries.
  7. How would non-hypertechnical users deal with this format?
  8. What about privacy? You're publishing everything on the web.

Believe it or not, these all seem surmountable, but they will require redefining important aspects of the microformat.

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Bud posted this on March 23, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

xFolk: An xhtml microformat for folksonomy

xFolk is an open xhtml microformat that allows users to publish their own folksonomy classifications for aggregation by the services they choose. As such, it starts to give back users control of their own data. A side benefit of xFolk is that users may designate explicit semantics for their folksonomy tags, providing a link to the more formal practices of information architects.

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Folksonomy is an emerging practice on the Internet where people tag digital artifacts (e.g., pictures, bookmarks) with their own labels and then share them. Of course, people in the real world have been tagging and sharing collections for years; consider record and coin collections with tags like classical, rock, jazz, Merovingian, etc. One factor that makes tagging on the Internet different is that items and their tags can be shared with the world at large very easily, allowing for an emergent understanding of how common, tagged items are viewed by a large number of people. Further, folksonomy tagging with web-based tools (e.g., flickr and del.icio.us) is also very easy.

As a result of ease of tagging and sharing, folksonomy is spreading on the web like wild fire. Fickr, the folksonomy-based photo sharing service, has over 300,000 users, and Robert Scoble has signaled folksonomy tagging to Microsoft's senior management as an area requiring strategic investment.

Currently, all folksonomy data formats are proprietary and idiosyncratic to the service providing them, likely as a result of folksonomy's ad hoc development to date. There is no easy way to transfer one's data from one service to another. Further, there is currently no format for sharing or even expressing one's explicit understanding of the meaning of his/her own folksonomy tags. Tag and object tagged mutually and implicitly define each other without an explicit anchor point.

In this post I will motivate and sketch xFolk, a microformat for specifying and publishing folksonomies using components already part of xhtml. Since xhtml is already a well-established web standard, a compelling motivation for creating the xFolk microformat is that it will enable users to independently maintain their own folksonomy data while still being able to easily share it. A byproduct is that xFolk will allow those who wish to define explicit semantics for their folksonomy tags to do so, and these semantics will also be easily shared.

xFolk is inspired by Eric Meyer's and Tantek Çelik's panels at SXSW 2005 on emergent semantics and extending xhtml. My thoughts are at a very early stage and might even be termed a pre-proposal, but I am publishing them here because I think they are sufficiently developed to profit from community interaction.

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Bud posted this on March 22, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (2)

Sixapart: Movable Type as a Blog Application Platform

If Six Apart's Movable Type blogging tool moves toward a blogging application platform, maintaining applications built with Movable Type will be easier. I give suggestions for architectural changes that might make building multiblog and community blog applications easier. These will be important for success in the corporate and education markets Six Apart is currently targeting.

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Sixapart's blogging products power roughly 40% of all current blogs. At the SXSW conference this past weekend, I had a chance to see and speak to Jay Allen, the product manager for Movable Type (MT), Six Apart's standalone server blogging product. Six Apart is looking to make MT into more of a blogging application platform. They are also considering how MT will integrate with advanced technologies like Ajax, a combination of browser and server technologies that creates a more seamless user experience.

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Bud posted this on March 16, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (1)

XHTML and how to trick out your blog

Blogging is an extremely social practice. The work to extend XHTML at SXSW seems largely aimed at further facilitating the social aspects of blogging.

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I'm continuing my thematic coverage of SXSW (South by Southwest) with two oddly interconnected panels, both were done by Tantek Celik of Technorati. Tantek is very into light weight methods to achieve effects. In the XHTML panel he held forth on a method he and others have been pioneering for extending XHTML without having to go to all of the trouble of creating a formal namespace. This talk was the technical side of a talk by Eric Meyer on emergent semantics that I blogged earlier.

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Bud posted this on March 15, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

Emergent Semantics and Folksonomy

The idea of emergent semantics is to provide a light weight mechanism for defining a standard usage in markup. The mechanism is available to anyone with a web page. It might be a nice incremental mechanism for folksonomists to use as they themselves attempt to impose some order on their own emergent tagging behavior.

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Folksonomy refers to how people organize their personally collected information into categories. Think of how you file documents in directories based on the project they are for. People are now applying the term to how they organize bookmarks in online bookmarking systems or photo sharing systems.

A lot of the power of folksonomy comes from being able to look across how a number of people are tagging an item and finding items tagged by other people with the same tag you are using. However, a major issue with folksonomy is that the tags you use are relatively undefined. You yourself may even forget what they mean and there is frequently tag drift as tags are used slightly differently by different people. Today, Eric Meyer gave an interesting talk on the idea of emergent semantics and suggested a mechanism that may help a bit with tag drift.

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Bud posted this on March 13, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

SXSW

I'm seeing a lot of people trying to monetize sharing. It takes the right mix of technology and social platforms. I think it also has to be really low cost for people to produce the shared object.

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I'm at South by Southwest, part of my early March conference tour to help get The Community Engine launched. I noticed Brian Bailey is blogging it, and thought I would throw in my 2 cents. He's very upbeat about the content. Me, much less so about the content. I've seen the conference more as what he described of Zeldman (attended; where's the meat?) and less of what he described of Fried (did not attend).

My cut is that this is an incredible networking conference andy may be worth it just for that. It can go from substantive networking (you feel like you are talking to someone who shares real interest and passion) to schmooze (trying to get in good with big wigs) to social grooming (everyone's in a clique and petting each other). I'm a bit more on the substantive networking side but can certainly schmooze. I tend not to get into cliques but find them interesting to observe.

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Bud posted this on March 13, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)