Folksonomy makes tag aggregators king of search rankings
Technorati tag aggregation pages are achieving top ten search results for significant, niche terms like podcasting, folksonomy, and blogosphere. Technorati's introduction of the seemingly obscure reltag microformat is at the root of its rise in the search rankings. Competitors seeking to duplicate technorati's results need only adapt the reltag or xFolk microformats to their own ends.
Current wisdom has it that, in web publishing, content is king. As the web has grown to upward of 11.5 billion pages, search has become the default way of navigating the web. Search engines determine a site's ranking based on indexable content, so content as seen by search engines had better be your king if you want to be found.
What current wisdom has not allowed for is the idea that folksonomy tag aggregators like technorati might form an intervening layer between content providers and search engines. There is evidence that this has started to occur in topics related to social software during the six short months since technorati began to aggregate weblog posts by tag.
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Bud posted this on June 13, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
xFolk — Blogmarks really steps up to the plate
Blogmarks has provided excellent support for xFolk in their Blog Sync functionality.
I meant to post about this earlier but have been very busy with client work. Blogmarks has really stepped up to the plate with xFolk support in their newly renovated blog sync functionality. Blog sync allows you to republish in your blog the links you bookmarked that day.
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Bud posted this on June 12, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
User contributed changes incorporated in xFolk 0.4
I made changes to my recent post about xFolk 0.4 based on user feedback.
A number of people have commented on my recent announcement concerning xFolk 0.4. So far, they have found two markup errors which I have fixed, taking care to credit the individuals who provided the solutions: Rijk van Geijtenbeek and Lim Chee Aun.
Bud posted this on June 5, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
de.lirio.us implements xFolk
Steve Mallett of de.lirio.us has formatted their folksonomy listing pages using xFolk. When folksonomy publishers implement xFolk as their output format, their users still have the same hassle-free bookmarking interface and gain more highly semantic markup for no cost. The more semantic the markup, the better Internet visibility.
Steve Mallett, creator of de.lirio.us, has formatted their folksonomy listing pages in xFolk:
I set up de.lirio.us to do this [publish using xFolk markup] a few minutes ago. I must say I do like this a better than the technorati tag format thing. I like technorati, but it's a bit too technorati-centric.
Conversation on tags & liberating tagged data - I did it anyway | Fooworks - 'blog of Steve Mallett
Steve's major issue was how using xFolk would affect the end user, a point raised just today by Tantek Çellik in regard to gaining acceptance for microformats.
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Bud posted this on June 5, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)
An xFolk 0.4 Implementation for Blogmarks
xhtml microformats like xFolk make sharing information easier. Their greatest value is realized when they are used by large numbers of people. To that end, I am pushing for xFolk's implementation as a publishing format for several social bookmarking tools. Blogmarks is the first to respond.
As put so well by Peter Merholz among others, xFolk is:
... a markup extension to allow tags to be created anywhere, not just through systems like del.icio.us.
You’re It! » xFolk - technology for decentralized tagging
Just to be clear, the “tagging” he is talking about is when people bookmark things they find on the web under informal categories (tags). These tags can make that bookmark easier to find later and to quickly find related (similarly tagged) resources. Systems like del.icio.us enable the tagging (labeling) itself, and they let users share the tagged bookmarks among themselves. Tagging has proven to be quite popular, at least among a certain group. You might think of it as appealing to the same urge that causes people to become coin, art, or music collectors.
The point of xFolk is to make it possible to easily share your bookmarks outside of systems like del.icio.us. One important step in getting this vision to reality is to get services that enable tagging to use the xFolk format. BlogMarks.net (a social bookmarking tool originally signaled to me by Jonas Luster) has been kind enough to share template code that you can use with their blog sync feature to make xFolk formatted bookmarks from their service appear in your blog.
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Bud posted this on June 3, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)
xFolk Entry 0.4 — Microformat for decentralized tagging
xFolk Entry 0.4 is a new iteration of the xFolk microformat that is extremely easy to implement. It enables the publication of tagged bookmarks so that they can be harvested on the web and aggregated into folksonomies. As such, xFolk eliminates the need to rely on centralized data repositories to create folksonomies.
xFolk is an xhtml microformat that enables users to tag and share bookmarks on the Internet without using a centralized system such as del.icio.us or flickr. To give a concrete idea of how xFolk facilitates decentralized bookmark tagging, consider a writer who wishes to publish a list of related links at the end of a web article. At the end of the article, the writer simply formats the links and tags in xFolk. Then a web crawler that understands xFolk can digest the page and extract the link information, placing it in one of possibly many directories. In this example, xFolk's underlying use of well understood standards already widely used by publishers and crawlers eliminates the need for the centralized services that currently exist. A similar scenario exists for link blogs.
xFolk 0.4 vastly simplifies the xFolk 0.3 microformat proposed six weeks ago so that it can be implemented in under five minutes on a variety of web publishing platforms. The simplification was achieved in part by splitting xFolk 0.3 in two: (1) xFolk Entry, described here, for indicating folksonomy tags and annotations for links in web articles and (2) xFolk Definition, described in a later post, for providing folksonomy tag semantics. Additionally, xFolk Entry 0.4 now makes use of the widely adopted reltag format, further limiting the scope that xFolk itself must cover. Finally, xFolk Entry 0.4 reduces the number of class attributes to three without a reduction in expressive power.
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Bud posted this on May 31, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBack (6)
xFolk 0.3 — xhtml microformat for emergence
In this post, I have described an iteration of xFolk that is much more similar to previous microformat efforts in how it specifies and uses attribute values. This version should be easy to implement in templates and tools. Ten examples from current web sites illustrate how xFolk might be implemented in functioning web pages.
xFolk is an xhtml microformat that allows people to apply tags to links in web articles and even whole articles themselves. These tags can be thought of as subject headings that help readers understand what the linked reference is all about and perhaps lead to whole repositories of references on that heading. By providing this service to readers, xFolk also enhances the ability of search engines to process and index the pages in which the links occur as well as the pages the links point at. In this way, xFolk also provides the benefits of structured blogging without introducing any markup beyond standard xhtml.
This post provides a new iteration of xFolk markup based on extensive feedback from Tantek Çelik, Kevin Marks, and Thomas Vander Wal as well as various postings from around the web. The purpose of the new iteration is to provide a version that: (1) fits within the standard approach for defining such formats as provided by examples like XFN, Votelinks, XOXO, hCard, and hCalendar; and (2) can be easily implemented in weblog and other softare. The new iteration also retains the original goal of allowing authors to express explicit semantics (meanings) for their tags if they choose.
The rest of this post proceeds as follows. I'll simply lay out the new version of the microformat. Then I'll very briefly lay out the conceptual use cases and finally go through ten applications pulled from working sites on the web.
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Bud posted this on April 19, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (2)
Web 2.0 — machines and people with xhmtl microformats to bind them
Web 2.0 is emerging from individual's ability to create with technology. Xhtml microformats help by bridging the human-technology gap.
Web 2.0 is supposed to be a transition out of the html world of people viewing web pages and processing information to an xml world of machines processing web content without human intervention. Lest Web 2.0 sound too scifi, search engines and the services that have grown out of them (like this combination of Google maps with Craig's List) are examples of Web 2.0. Although search engines deliver services to people, they perform these services without human intervention.
In this light, the remarkable thing about Web 2.0 to date is the extent to which it has emerged from individual creativity. For instance, Google itself started as a research project, and many of Google's products have been created during the day a week employees are encouraged to spend on their own ideas. So, almost paradoxically, people's ability to understand Web 2.0 technologies and create with them, not the technology's machine processing characteristics, has been the determining factor in the growth of Web 2.0.
In effect, Web 2.0 is a combination of machines and people, not just machines communicating on their own. Likewise, xhtml microformats are a combination of machine processable xml and human understandable html. Ins some sense, this makes xhtml microformats perfect for implementing Web 2.0. As Ryan King puts it so eloquently,
... the measure should not be “how expressive is this technology?” but “how much does this encourage and facilitate personal expression?”
theryanking.com » Follow up on Microformats
Bud posted this on April 14, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
xFolk — schema for emergence
Folksonomy provides value through emergent structure and direct personal value to the user. In reformulating xFolk, this post focuses on the data schema needed to support emergent structure. The next post will focus on the xhtml microformat.
Yesterday, Dave Sifry announced Technorati's related tag feature. Tags are simple, one word descriptors that people apply to their own and others' web articles for later recall. Services like Technorati, del.icio.us, de.lirio.us, and scuttle aggregate these tags into folksonomies that exhibit useful emergent structure. The simplest example of one such emergent structure arises from assuming that people mean the same thing when they use the same tag and then using the aggregated tags as a sort of navigation hierarchy. All of the services mentioned do this. With technorati's announcement, they all now also offer a related tags feature. The simplest version of related tags is to say that tags are related when enough people use them to label the same set of artifacts. For instance, if one set of users are labeling a set of sites with “baseball” and another group are labeling the same sites with “MLb”, it is reasonable to assume the two tags are related. These relations can be added to enrich the navigation structure.
There are many more examples of such emergence through aggregation, currently less explored, that have potentially greater commercial value. xFolk is an xhtml microformat that makes it easier for people to share their vision of the world by tagging URLs in their web articles. People will derive value from xFolk in two ways: (1) from information that emerges by aggregating individual tags across many people or even just one person; (2) from the ease of being able to tag things for their own personal recall. Note that these two value propositions require xFolk to address two very different concerns. The first is that of aggregators who must collect together all of these tagged artifacts. The second is that of users who must wrestle with the microformat to tag URLs in their web articles.
This article focuses on enabling the first part of the value proposition to users; specifically, what is the underlying data schema that allows for the highest value aggregations? This schema provides an indication of the desired data elements to be included in any xhtml microformat that end-users will employ. The next article in this series, “xhtml microformat for Emergence” will consider how this schema can be translated into a format that end-users and, more likely, end-user tools can employ in a wide variety of use cases.
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Bud posted this on April 10, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)
The business value of folksonomy and xFolk
The value of folksonomy is that it increases the information value of content for all concerned. The value of xhtml microformats like xFolk is that they lower the costs and barriers to transmit the content better than competing approaches.
In my spare time for the past several weeks, I've been working on xFolk, an xhtml microformat to allow people to tag the links they put in their blog posts and share those tags, often referred to as folksonomy. The tags consist of one or more one word descriptors that tell what the link is about. The altruistic value of tagging links is that the tag can help people better determine what you intend for them to draw from the link, and the tag can tell them where to look for more information. Fine, but what's the business proposition?
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Bud posted this on April 5, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Why xFolk? Folksonomy enhances search
Folksonomy is not a threat to search. Rather, it enhances search by making the meaning of links more explicit. Yahoo seems to have realized this in their purchase of flickr.
Steve Rubel makes an excellent point regarding the power of folksonomy in response to a Business Week article on tagging
The BW article also underscores the rising importance of tags for marketers. Often I am asked why I think tags are a big deal. The reason is simple - it makes consumer-generated content a lot more discoverable.
Micro Persuasion: When It Comes to Tagging, You're It
Folksonomy is not a threat to search. Rather, it enhances search by making the meaning of links more explicit. As I discussed five days ago, this is one of the chief motivators behind xFolk (Josh Porter take note).
Steve further discusses how search engines might use tagging:
As I told Wired News earlier this year, I believe that Yahoo and Google will eventually enable their users categorize and share searches under specific tags.
Micro Persuasion: When It Comes to Tagging, You're It
Not so clear that this is the way they will go. What would make much more sense is for people to tag individual links returned by a search for meaning. Google and other major search engines could then use this information to determine the relevance the person found in a particular link given the search keywords. Think this is all theoretical. Yahoo may have already started down this path by purchasing flickr. Further, it's one of the uses you can currently make of technorati tags, particularly if you factor in attention.xml. It's also one of the ideas behind feedmarker.
Bud posted this on April 3, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1)
xhtml microformats — What's the use?
Proof is in the pudding for microformats.
Sometimes in the fervor of generating a new idea, you neglect that the reason to charge ahead is not as apparent to others. This is particularly the case if the machinery that makes the idea work has not been built yet. Such, I think, is frequently the case with xhtml microformats which can be thought of as a means to annotate web pages for better machine processing. Josh Porter put it well earlier today:
What I’m not sold on yet is the usefulness of microformats. I don’t have any use for them yet, and as far as I can see there has been a lot of pushback on the “nofollow” microformat. But what about the others? I know of rubhub.com, but what use is it? Any ideas out there? I’m new to this stuff…
Joshua Porter, Bokardo
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Bud posted this on March 31, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Folksonomy — Practical Application and xFolk
Folksonomy is one means of self-expression in a group, a sort of: “let me share with you my vision of the world by tagging parts of it”. xFolk makes this type of expression easier in web pages by adapting and generalizing semantic markup for a number of use cases.
In folksonomy, people tag digital artifacts (web articles, media files, etc.) and share the tagged artifacts with others. Want to see the latest web articles on folksonomy, look under the technorati or del.icio.us aggregations for the tag folksonomy. Want to find the latest pictures of Boston, look under the flickr aggregation for the tag Boston.
Either of the experiments I just suggested will show both the strengths and weaknesses of organizing archives based on common tag. You will discover things you consider personally relevant mixed in with a lot of dreck. The debate on the quality of archives organized by tag has reached the point where David Weinberger finds it possible to debate himself at length on the topic without reaching a solid conclusion.
Rather than just focusing on folksonomy for navigation, it may be more useful to adopt the perspective that folksonomy is one means of self-expression in a group, a sort of: “let me share with you my vision of the world by tagging parts of it”. Further, considering folksonomy as individual expression opens the mind to many useful aggregation and analysis possibilities. For instance, what does the aggregate of tags applied to given artifacts tell us about how people perceive them? How can individual tagging patterns across artifacts help us figure out a translation between personal tag vocabularies to better communicate with one another?
When I first proposed xFolk a week ago, I mainly saw its utility in helping people share this type of individual expression. To do so, xFolk has to meet a number of technical and social desiderata. Feedback over the past few days has helped me narrow down issues with the first proposal, the state of other efforts to achieve goals in line with xFolk, and various ways of better expressing the microformat for semantic “correctness” and generalization.
In the rest of this post, I want to lay out a revised view of the issues xFolk should address and a strategy for doing so. In a later post to follow shortly, I will return to the nitty gritty of xFolk's markup.
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Bud posted this on March 29, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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.
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:
- My creative use of the rel attribute might be hard to get accepted (several issues here)
- 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?
- 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.
- In xhtml (and to some extent generally in xml), attribute values tend not to contain user data. Tags are best considered user data.
- 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.
- 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.
- How would non-hypertechnical users deal with this format?
- 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.
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 23, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (2)
xFolk and Learning Blogosophere
Expect some interesting folksonomy and Learning Blogosphere posts.
I've been a bit ambitious in my projects, and so my posting frequency has dropped off a bit. Sometime in the next day or two, you should see a post about xFolk. This is an exciting project born out of this year's IASummit and SXSW one-two punch. It really has the potential to help people trying to publish folksonomies in non-vendor specific formats.
I also have several more posts on the Learning Blogosphere work in process. It's all just a matter of getting the time to crank them out.
Bud posted this on March 22, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
