The Community Engine Blog: tagging Archives

A Tag Cloud Interface for Community

Here's a little user interface enhancement that I have created for the tag-based remix learning site.

So, we've launched the remix learning site. The idea here is that students in a class about databases and information contribute by making blog posts and bookmarking web pages. Students tag each blog post and bookmark based on the class conversation topics they feel they contribute to. Posts with multiple tags contribute to multiple conversations.

The remix learning site gathers student contributions several times a day and archives them in a movable type blog. The interface allows people to view contributions grouped by tag. That's great, but the question is how to present these topics to people in a way that they can view: the most recent, the most talked about, the whole universe.

To do that, I have come up with this tag cloud:

The key element in the default view is that items are sorted in reverse order by recency. Frequency is indicated by size of the tag in the cloud. Visitors also have the option of sorting alphabetically and by pure frequency.

Bud posted this on September 13, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

A Tag Based Learning Remix

We attempt to crack the class participation nut by mandating participation in an online self-organizing space. Our aggregation mechanism is based on the tags participants provide for their contributions. This post describes our underlying concept and the variety of technologies we employ.

A perennial classroom issue is student participation. Even if students are enthusiastic, limited time dictates that only a few will be heard in any single session. Limited participation limits instructors' opportunities to find out what students know and inhibits the potential discovery of useful information for everybody. This post outlines a web-based learning remix project at Michigan's Ross School of Business that is designed to remove classroom limits on student participation. The system operates according to a few simple pinciples:

Require that everyone participate.
Move the vast majority of class participation online.
Structure online participation so that it is self-organizing.

We believe our system achieves the first and second goals and makes good progress on the third. On the input side, each student makes fifteen tagged (informally categorized) microcontributions per week by bookmarking sites in del.icio.us and making blog posts in WordPress Multi-User. Multiple times each day, reBlog and the Movable Type publishing platform gather, remix, and present the student contributions based on the tags students supplied.

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Bud posted this on September 10, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Veg-o-matic: An alpha web service using xFolk

“It slices, it dices ...” More specifically, this post presents an alpha release of a web service based on greasemonkey and reblog that identifies, validates, cleans, and republishes xFolk microformatted content. All comments are welcome.

I'm releasing a very alpha hack of an xFolk web service for this labor day weekend. Recall that xFolk is a microformat for representing the sort of social bookmark data you would find on a site like del.icio.us. A lot of people are republishing their links from such sites in their blogs. The advantage of using a microformat like xFolk for this sort of thing is that it makes it easier to write software to do something useful with the data.

The hack I am presenting here is a combination of a greasemonkey script and an alpha version of the reBlog refeed tool by eyebeam research and stamen design. The main action of interest is in the greasemonkey script that:

Finds all instances of xFolk microformatted content in a page.
Determines which of those instances are valid (i.e., contain all the required elements as indicated in the xFolk spec).
Creats a clean clone of the xFolk entry that only contains elements specified in the spec.
Uses an xml object to serialize the cleaned clone into a form element for republishing.
Adds a script to the valid xFolk instances that makes it possible to republish their “cleaned” version via Mike Migurski's alpha rewrite of the reblog republishing tool released by eyebeam and stamen

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Bud posted this on September 2, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Greasemonkey & microformats: Getting started

This post presents a ten line javascript that can be used to identify and process virtually any microformatted content. The script uses the Firefox web browser's greasemonkey framework. The script and the general capabilities of modern web browsers suggest a general processing strategy for microformatted content where identification and pre-processing occur in the browser.

Greasemonkey is designed to make user javascripts easy to write in the Firefox web browser. Since greasemonkey's introduction, literally hundreds of people have written and contributed scripts that alter a page's markup to enhance the user experience. A knock against greasemonkey has been that it amounts to using javascript for ad hoc screen scraping. Greasemonkey scripts are easy to write, but you almost have to write a new one for each web page, and scripts are often not robust to even simple changes in markup on the pages they are written for.

Thus, greasemonkey and microformats seem a natural for each other. Microformats make it possible to create semantic markup structures in standard xhtml that are re-used across many web pages. Greasemonkey scripts written to trigger solely on microformatted xhtml markup could therefore be automatically re-used across many web pages. Further, since microformats are created following standard specification writing practices, deprecated microformat constructs remain part of the spec for some time after their deprecation. When a microformat was revised, greasemonkedy scripts written for that microformat would need only be updated to add triggers for the newer constructs.

However, novices to user scripting, and I count myself among these, generally find scripting for microformats challenging. Microformats add semantics to markup by creating conventions around the use of attribute values. Isolating these attribute values and using them to trigger processing can seem daunting as related by Brian Suda in his account of creating an XSLT script to process hCard, one type of microformatted markup. A simple inspection of this script reveals the pains Suda had to undertake just to identify when the microformat was being used.

I'm writing this post today to introduce a simple greasemonkey script that presents a general and robust method for identifying microformatted content. The script makes use of capabilities built into both Firefox and Microsoft's Internet Explorer that make processing microformatted markup easier than it might be in other contexts. The remarkable simplicity of this script (there are only 10 lines of code) coupled with its power (it even works on pages that are not well-formed) suggests that greasemonkey and microformats are natural allies if you just know the trick of getting them to cooperate.

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Bud posted this on July 28, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)

Imitation is the surest sign of success

I disagree with Jason Calacanis. IceRocket's adoption of tagging using a format invented by technorati indicates that technorati is achieving wide marketplace acceptance. By my estimates over a million bloggers are using the technorati format.

Today, Jason Calacanis wrote about how icerocket, a blog search engine, had added tagging support. Jason's remarks were, typically for him lately, riding technorati a bit.

But it's how IceRocket supports tags that's the real kicker. They're using the reltag microformat invented by Tantek Çelik, Kevin Marks, and Derek Powazek of technorati as explained on this IceRocket help page.

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Bud posted this on July 20, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

xFolk RC1 — An xhtml microformat for social bookmarking

xFolk is a simple and open format for publishing collections of bookmarks. It better enables services for improving user experience and sharing data in web-based bookmarking software. Providers can view user efforts to create new services using xFolk-formatted data as a sort of low-cost R&D.

This post announces release candidate 1 of xFolk, an xhtml microformat for social bookmarking as popularized by del.icio.us and a growing host of other services. Microformats are conventions for conveying information on the web in a way that is easily machine processible. Users can then experiment with ways of presenting and combining it. These experiments are, in effect, a sort of low-cost R&D, that web publishers may choose to capitalize on as they pan out.

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Bud posted this on July 8, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Distributed Tagging Hell

When many pieces loosely joined break, all hell can break loose without too much effort. Apologies to Tim O'Reilly who I have tracked back to 4 times at least for just one of his posts and all of you who are getting duplicate posts in your feeds.

At O'Reilly's Where 2.0, Stephen Randall put it best in terms of what he wants for usability:

One hand (not complex for those who get it)
Two billion people (anyone can get it)
Three steps (no time commitment)

Neither Movable Type nor distributed tagging (via technorati) are like this, but they need to be.

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Bud posted this on June 30, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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