A griot (pronounced /g?i.??/ in English or [??i.o] in French, with a silent t) or jeli (djeli or djéli in French spelling) is a West African poet, praise singer, and wandering musician, considered a repository of oral tradition. – Wikipedia

Also an emerging tag for describing the ongoing protest in Athens over a 16 year old being shot to death at point blank range by Athens policemen.

Being used on Flickr, blogs, and Twitter and the meta del.icio.us. Not being used by the corporate media (aside: the trailing ‘s’ is lexically significant, classic stemming does not work on tags)

Does anyone know how and where this tag emerged?

Clearly the next evolution in participatory media (and the only type with a future) is figuring out what the tools to discover, distribute and broadcast these meta-media collaborative objects. Who is thinking and writing about this?

Photo by murplejane

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_tag

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

(This post is another WordPress meta post, one of several I’ve got queued up in my head, and probably interesting to 3 people in the known universe, but here you go.)

better_cat_lists is WordPress plugin that adds a couple of more flexible methods.

wp_list_popular_categories

works like wp_list_cats, but only categories with $cat_threshold posts in them.

wp_list_popular_categories('sort_column=name&cat_threshold=20');

wp_list_recent_categories

works like wp_list_cats, but only from posts with the last $n days. You can also limit the total number with $cat_limit

wp_list_recent_categories('days_ago=180&cat_limit=80');

Both methods use the same hack, they overload the list_cats_exclusions callback to do positive match instead of the intended negative match – appending and cat_ID in ($cat_ids) to the exclusion string. PHP at its finest, quick and dirty, like monkey patching but without language level support for it.

My original desire was driven by the desire to build playlists by mood, or theme (‘electronic’, ‘sensual’, ‘dark’), but since then Pandora has launched and showed us another set of axes to explore (‘mild rhythmic syncopation’, ‘extensive vamping’).

I think the ability to hang a variety of arbitrary data off of the MusicBrainz model would kill CDDB deader then a stake through the heart, and at the same time creating a platform where its easier to collaborate in public then in silos. Tagging is just the first, easiest to under form that might take. Got to use all that lovely RDF to some purpose!

Tom’s Phonetags is useful prior art.

Even folks who’ve managed to stay fairly anonymous leak a lot of info in their tags.

It was pointed out that

[Yahoo] recently hired all the IBM people that worked at the WebFountain project.

And that the del.icio.us database of tagged website would be an awfully juicy source of data to start analyzing. Yahoo is the obvious player to build post-search interfaces, browsable and discoverable like Yahoo of old, but this time built to Web-scale.

Meanwhile is anyone watching the Flock’s future? What with its APIs to Yahoo’s Flickr, Yahoo’s del.icio.us, and integrated editor for all those new MT blogs. Just a thought.

http://www.feedexa.com/

For a while there was largely nothing, then there was Allconsuming which was wonderful, but slowly died, and went dark before being re-incarnated in the mold of a 43x tool. And I have this memory of there being a nifty little $14/mo tool, back in the days when I didn’t pay for websites, but I wasn’t able to find it.

Last Fall, I started sketching down notes towards building my own, and in the intervening year its become an interestingly crowded space. (who knew so many other people felt the pull) Even in the 6 weeks since I first started jotting down sites for this blog post, the space has evolved with LibraryThing coming out solidly on top as the most active: most actively developed, most actively used, and most actively engaged developer.

That said, in a cursory search (mostly of my del.icio.us links) I turned up 5 other very similar services

• Allconsuming: the Next Generation
• Bibliophil
• Books We Like – “activist e-commerce and collective intelligence”
• Listal – where “all” is defined as DVDs, Books, Music, and Games
• Reader2 – repurposing of the MyProgs codebase

Also the Bookshelf example app from 24L, and the intersting related services What Should I Read Next?, and Library Elf

None of them are quite there yet, and I want more, more, more!

LibraryThing

• So like I said, LT is rocking out in terms of development and growth. When I first found it, it lacked import, ratings, and feeds. Wow.

• Additionally the search is amazingly comprehensive, fast, and accurate. Search is where LibraryThing originally shined, and it blows every other service out of the water. LT was the only service to successfully come up with “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town” when I searched for “someone comes”. Which is good, because there is no way I’m typing in full titles. (just re-tested, and Allconsuming which wasn’t finding anything last time I checked, also came up with the correct results)

• Surprisingly zippy.

• One-click export. Sweet.

LibraryThings: The Downside

• No per-tag feeds, apparently on the todo list, but I need per feed tags.

• No feed of reviews, also on the todo list, but I’m simply not willing to create content without an RSS feed. (which is why I’ve stopped writing $0.02 reviews on Netflix)

• Feeds lack anything beyond basic data. No structured meta-data (authors, isbn/asin, cover art, etc), so very limited usefulness.

• One dimensional tags. (no tag combos)

• Ugly, and awkward. Totally in the eye of the beholder, but I find the interface consistently confusing and awkward to use. I only have a handful of books in my catalog, but already its feeling unmanageable. Not a designer, so I can’t do much more then complain.

• One comment/review per book, meaning you can’t use it to blog your ongoing experience with a book. One of my use cases for a book service is that I can use it to power a book blog.

• Uses frames!?!?? In this day and age? Meaning it can’t be the that “definitive URI for books” that I keep looking for.

Listal

• More then just books if you’re in to that thing. I’m not really, and find it kind of frustrating that I sometimes end up searching DVDs.

• Slick, clean, attractive.

• Allows browsing by author! (key missing feature for LibraryThing)

• Per tag feeds, multiple reviews/comments per book.

Listal: Cons

• Feels sluggish, aggravated by a click heavy interface.

• Limited import.

• Not run by a book nut, and in general the site is voiceless failing to expose either the developer, or the user community. Feels stagnant.

• Search failed the “Someone Comes” test.

Bookshelf

I thought I was going to like Bookshelf. I love the concept of the Ning “Pivot”, if not the implementation. Unfortunately Bookshelf is very slow, and buggy. I dived into the code (I can do that with Ning, whoohoo!!!), and unfortunately rather then the domain specific langauge for building social webapps I expected to find, I just found a messy of PHP code.

What I Still Want/Need/Dream About

I wrote down a list of things I wanted a while back, and LT is converging on it very quickly, and for that I’m inclined to overlook the interface.

Syndication

I need more feeds. Per tag feeds allow for intelligent interaction with the site. Beyond topical tags, functional tags (e.g. *to:read) allow me to syndicate the information out in useful ways

And richer feeds please. E.g. if you can’t syndicate the cover art give me the necessary metadata so I can pull it from AWS.

More data and Webservices

And note, I’m happy with my primary webservice being a feed, but I need richer way to interact with the data before I can make it work for me.

I’d like to be able to hook this up to my local library (auto-request books flagged *to:read), Upcoming, and Amazon.

Plus I should be able to power my involvement in What to Read Next/Books We Like/innovative new service from within LT (or at least with my LT data)

More Pivots

I’d like author, and ratings smooshed down into the tag namespace. So I can browse by author, and by rating. Additionally I’d like to be able to browse tag combos, author plus tag combos, and author plus rating combos.

Insta-Community

I love the idea of integrating a forum into the site. And really integrating it.

1. Allow people to start new threads from a book page
2. Tag those threads with the book
3. Display only properly tagged threads on the book page
4. Aggregate all threads in a more standard forum view.

(We’ve discussed doing something similar for Social Source Commons, though haven’t yet)

Book Scanning

Ala Monster’s Delicious

What would be involved I wonder if writing a simple app/Firefox plugin to scan barcodes using something like an iSight or a CueCat, and have it post the data to a URL?

Blue Sky: Peerflix for Books?

Like Bookcrossing for books you want to get back someday.

update: Also Stuffopolis, and Douban

Digital Lifestyle Aggregation: Using My Friends

I’ve had this persistent idea, nagging me, that somehow I should be able to use my Flickr contacts to filter the overwhelming amount of data that gets pushed at me, with the small idea being if I had a way to capture the del.icio.us accounts of all my various contacts, then I could at least build a smarter del inbox. I had started to sketch out a tool (I was thinking ning) called “theyisthey” to keep track of relationships I know between people’s various identities. (43people subscriptions are one step in this direction, and certainly an indication of how social software can be used for purposes more interesting them high score lists.)

Hear the Good News

Well we showed up en masse (Brian, Ben, Eric Hopp, Jared, Mako, Seth and I) to the Joshua’s Berkman lunch yesterday, and the most explosively interesting thing I thought he said (beyond some numbers which Brian wrote down) was that “networks” are in the works. A replacement for del’s broken inbox metaphor, networks are 1-way, opaque social networks that you can build to not only filter content, but also enhance it. (e.g. when tagging a link, see the tags and notes from everyone in your network who has also tagged this link, or install the Firefox plugin to see your networks notes on webpages in the wild)

Very cool.

(also count it, 5 Hampshire alumns in the house, we offered to make Seth an honoray Hampshire alumn, but he turned us down)

http://developer.jot.com/WikiHome/JotTaggingExperiment

a more intriguing, way of aggregating tags up through a conceptual chain would be to view albums as collections of songs and artists as a collection of albums/songs.

Are there any information theories about encouraging people to tag the smallest indivisable instead of the container? (the song vs. the show in the Phonetags example) Or perhaps conversely to tag largest common demoninator? Perhaps its a lighter burden on the commons to get the handful of shows tagged, rather then each and every song? Will that always be a false normalization, one that short circuits an important cognitive process perhaps?

Because I’ve been in a couple of discussion of items inheriting tags from their containers, where the container (e.g. a playlist at H2O, a playlist at Odeo, or a SSC toolbox) are the primary objects; meaning derived from the unique combination of different items.

And while we’re bubbling tags, do we bubble tags sideways? Phonetags enriching the rumored MusicBrainz tagging project? And if so I wonder if the tags need to be qualified? I mean if syndicating tags is going to be anything more then a gimmick we need to know the source and the tagger, something like kellan@phonetags/electronic as distinct from kellan@del.icio.us/electronic, and kellan@musicbrainz/electronic?

No answers, just questions.

(ps. using David’s system, this post is pre-alpha)

http://technorati.com/tags/BigHook

So what happens when we take off our DBA hat, and put back on our programmer hats? (because really, who has seperate DBAs these days?)

Most implementations I’ve seen treat tags as something you put in a bucket attached to an object. (could be most implementations I’ve seen are in Rails which encourages this)

But tags aren’t something an object has, their something an actor said about an object. An actor is key. Tags without someone/something behind them are devoid of context and meaningless. So rather then coding it as:

object.tags << sometags

consider

user.tags(object, sometags)

where tags is no longer a noun (a collection), but a verb.

At some point I don’t care how you store it in your database, but you need to be thinking about it as something a user is doing to the object.

http://interrupt.hampshire.edu/darkclouds/

MusicBrainz could really distinguish itself, if it could provide a commons where I could tag/discover music metadata like the rich mood/genre info you can find from AllMusic.

Anyone have a solution for me? In particular a solution that doesn’t involve me having to tag all my music myself?

Because I could really use a playlist of music this morning tagged “lush electronic romantic”, you know?

Finally they’re going to do something with all that user generated content across the O’Reilly Network sites. For some reason they’ve never been able to catalyze decent user community around all that content, but at least having persistent profiles will help. (not that I’m in a position to criticize as I explicitly passed on the opportunity to help them make it better, when I went to Groundspring)

Tags, Not Just a Gimmick

The closest thing to innovation is the heavy use of tags. Interestingly spending a couple of minutes filling out my profile reminded me that Friendster had a similar impl. of tags back in the day, we just none of us knew thats what they were.

Everybody and their dog is adding tags to their apps these days, but its interesting to see it working on Connection. More then an amusing (or annoying) toy, tags on Connection really enhance the browsability/discoverability of the site, and as discovery is the primary (non-broken) activity of a social network site, this is key.

Post Search

Couple that with Flickr’s new “Explore” features, and I think we’re starting to see a push to towards non-search techniques for discovery, a realization that perhaps Google has been a false plateau.

http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0405d.shtml

1. Matching on data intersection across a many-to-many join – aka, how to find an object (e.g. a post or a recipe) with two or more tags (i.e. show my all posts tagged with tagging and sql). For the lazy, skip to bottom for a solution. (but it’s worth reading through) This is what enables tag combos. (Also available from snippets)

2. Find items with similar (or as many as possible) relationships – for a ‘related posts’ box etc – aka, find other recipes tagged with similar tags to the recipe I’m currently looking at I’m currently looking at. In Recipes on Rails, if I’m looking at my recipe for hot chocolate (tags: beverage, hot, chocolate), use this query to also show tea and coffee. (both tagged beverage and hot)

3. Find all many-to-many relationships which are tied to an arbitrary number of other many-to-many relationships – I’m looking at all recipes with the tags easy, and hot, what are related tags I could use? How about carrot, and curry (my curry carrot soup is tagged easy, soup, carrot, and curry, not to mention winter and favorite), or maybe silly with which I’ve tagged my boiled water recipe.
   After some futzing I came up with the same query that Peter did, but I was really hoping there was another solution, as I’ve been seeing some of the same worrying numbers using MySQL 4.1.x’s subqueries that Kevin is.

There you go, you no longer have any excuse for building a sub-par tagging system.

fyi, Peter, from whom all those tips originate, on top of being the creator of the snippets site, is available for hire.

http://rc3.org/cgi-bin/less.pl?arg=6826