Flickr tag: “soshirkyithurts”

Kellan — Wed, 07 May 2008 08:59:35 +0000

Best tag ever?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/soshirkyithurts/

Is there any living, breathing example of a taxonomic approach working?

Kellan — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 18:46:48 +0000

Scaling to keep-up with the hyper-efficiency we see in peer-production systems? Anyone?

http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/hightouch?entry=taxonomies_vs_folksonomies

Slashdot on “folksonomies”. Got to love the comments.

Kellan — Mon, 24 Jan 2005 21:07:56 +0000

‘Now I know what the [non-techie] in my life feels like when they read slashdot’

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/04/0117245

del.icio.us/tag/antifolksonomy

Kellan — Mon, 24 Jan 2005 21:06:01 +0000

Tags are currently good at personal knowledge creation, and people are instead trying to use them as advertising

http://del.icio.us/tag/antifolksonomy

buzzword watch: Epistemological gangs

Kellan — Mon, 17 Jan 2005 01:41:44 +0000

Roaming gangs of librarians go ‘wilding’, tagging everything in site.

http://interconnected.org/home/mini/_9924

Linguistic convergence?

Kellan — Sat, 01 Feb 2003 18:07:04 +0000

I’ve noticed an odd phenomena. When searching Google I consistently see results from projects I’m involved in, people I know, and of course, myself.

A certain percentage of this can be written off to specialized interests. The overwhelming amount of search results I get which point to IMC archives is understandable, for example.

What I don’t understand is why a relatively generic query like “tar over ssh”, would return a message from the LUG at my alma matter(which didn’t exist when I went there), in a thread between 2 people I know well. Thats just odd. And this happens a lot. I’m going to start keeping track, but it happens all the time. (note: I’ve probably destroyed Google’s usefulness for searching for “tar over ssh” now by mentioning it)

I don’t know that many people, a very small number in fact, and even if they all produce content hyperactively, shouldn’t they be drowned out in a sea content? Whats going on?

My thought is perhaps we’re seeing the effect of Google having a language based interface. I search in English, and therefore I’m much more likely to get English results back. Most of the people I know speak English. On the Net however this doesn’t proscribe the field much. I think perhaps it needs to be broken down beyond that, I don’t just speak English, I speak a vernacular informed by age, class, education, social environment, etc. My word choices are a product of culture. For example Mako and Josiah from the above thread have both had significant impacts on the Linux culture I was raised in. Could even my 3 word query display a language bias? If I was a product of a different linguistic micro-culture would I have said “pipe” instead of “over”, asked for “remote” instead of “ssh”, re-ordered the terms?

And if perhaps Google was a taxonomy engine, building a search tree of structured data, and my queries were made in a precise, perhaps numerical, language, then would this convergence disappear? Would it work nearly as well then? A response from my culture after all brings a number of advantages, no one suggested using a tape drive instead, or buying F-Secure.

Some Other Possibilities.

Aidan is fast to point out humans are expert pattern makers, and inclined to see patterns where none (of significance) exist. Perhaps I only notice the occurrence when something unusual happens, and this convergence is a false pattern?
That for all the millions of internet users, content is created by a mind blowingly small percentage. That a given individual really can know a statistically significant percentage of the population.