Collaborative Thinking

Blackboard Educate Innovate: Tags & Social Bookmarks

I expect tagging and social bookmark technology to make incremental gains within enterprise environments over the next few years. I don't expect the type of proliferation that wikis and other socially-oriented tools have experienced but when applied effectively, I think the impact will be just as powerful. What makes this implementation interesting is the integration with LMS systems. It's not the LMS integration per se that I am intrigued by but rather the notion that participation in a particular context (in this case, a course association), causes an application to generate certain tags. This doesn't replace the ability for users to to apply any tags they come up with, for whatever reason, but it does aid in discovery efforts which provides for a non-intrusive mechanism for individuals to "find other people like me" around a formal institution (the class, the course). We see this now when events are held are organizers request that people blogging or sharing photographs assign a special tag.

What makes Scholar different from other social bookmarking services you may have used or heard of (e.g. del.icio.us) is how it works in an education setting.  Scholar has all the typical features you'd expect from a social bookmarking service (tagging, tag clouds, RSS feeds, a bookmarklet for browser integration, etc.), but we wanted to make social bookmarking more relevant for Blackboard-powered courses and academic research. We spent a lot of time thinking about the problems students and faculty encounter when they go about doing web research or building engaging courses, and getting feedback on those ideas about how social bookmarking could be enhanced for education. I'll give you a couple examples.

Pretty much all students and instructors do web research as part of their academic work. When they find resources that they want to keep around, tagging them makes them easier to find later.  Since they're students and teachers, we know that it's likely that they are saving the resources for a particular course, or for research in their discipline, specialty or major. So we created special tags that let users tag for disciplines or specific courses really easily. We make it extra easy by using the integration with the Learning System to automatically generate your course tags based on your courses enrollments in Blackboard. You won't see any course tags when you browse the public site because we're protecting student privacy by not disclosing users' course enrollments.

Source: Blackboard Educate Innovate: Scholar's in open beta!

Folksonomy :: vanderwal.net

A standing definition from Thomas Vander Wal. 

Definition of Folksonomy

Folksonomy is the result of personal free tagging of information and objects (anything with a URL) for one's own retrieval. The tagging is done in a social environment (usually shared and open to others). Folksonomy is created from the act of tagging by the person consuming the information.

The value in this external tagging is derived from people using their own vocabulary and adding explicit meaning, which may come from inferred understanding of the information/object. People are not so much categorizing, as providing a means to connect items (placing hooks) to provide their meaning in their own understanding.

In a few conversations around folksonomy and tagging in 2004 I stated, "folksonomy is tagging that works". This is still a strong believe the three tenets of a folksonomy: 1) tag; 2) object being tagged; and 3) identity, are core to disambiguation of tag terms and provide for a rich understanding of the object being tagged.

By: Thomas Vander Wal
On: 2 February 2007

Source: Folksonomy :: vanderwal.net

Pew Research on Tagging :: Off the Top :: vanderwal.net

Additional insight on the Pew report from one of the most respected thought-leaders on tagging:

I am really happy with the report as it looks at the numbers from a use perspective. Up to this point I have been using tagging service provider numbers (few are made public) along with Alexa hit reports across many services and took that total and divided by the Neilsen report number of total people on the web (approximately 750 million people). This approach provided about .85% of all the people on the web are tagging (does not include tagging on blogs as that is more ad hoc categories, but that is a long post to explain or done over a beer or two).

The difference between the percentages in the Pew report and the numbers I backed into is the Pew is just an American view and mine was looking at things globally. Pew looks at tags and categories and many systems have categories. I am really comfortable with the daily number of 7% on the web are tagging/categorizing and I will likely use that number in future presentations. The 28% number is really surprising, but for one time use it is accurate. This represents a much larger user base than I thought, but is also includes categories with tagging.

Separating Tagging and Categories

The Pew Report on Tagging combines categories and tagging. While optimally it would be great to separate the two out, explaining the difference between the two to a regular person (non-geek) in America will be difficult. Asking if somebody has used certain functionality on a service or one of the 130 or so social bookmarking tools or the many hundreds of products that include tagging will negatively impact the results. The terms tagging and categories combined for a research question make for a question that is more easily answered yes or no.

The Pew Report provides a starting place for future research, hopefully delving into the subject with a little more clarity, where tagging and categories are separated

Source: Pew Research on Tagging :: Off the Top :: vanderwal.net

Pew Internet: Tagging

An interesting read, especially given IBM's recent direction regarding tagging and social bookmarks within Lotus Connections (specificlly, its dogear component).

Tagging

1/31/2007 | Memo  | Lee Rainie

Just as the internet allows users to create and share their own media, it is also enabling them to organize digital material their own way, rather than relying on pre-existing formats of classifying information.

A December 2006 survey has found that 28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorize online content.

The report features an interview with David Weinberger, a prominent blogger and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

View PDF of Report

Source: Pew Internet: Tagging

alexbarnett.net blog : The Long Tail of Tags

Fascinating post on tags and how it applies to some of the concepts behind the Long Tail. 

The Long Tail of Tags

I made an observation the other day, that then led me to another and then another. Perhaps these are entirely obvious to you but I hadn't previously made the connection between the tags I use, their frequency in my tagcloud and Chris Anderson's 'the Long Tail' theory. Doing a quick search on the web, I haven't found anything specific to this topic, so I thought I share what I found.

Source: alexbarnett.net blog : The Long Tail of Tags

Alex continues with some interesting analysis around tags and language and internal thought processing:

This is more than a variation on the theme of the Long Tails of language (Zipf's observation that the frequency of words used in the English language followed a powerlaw distribution) and words - this is the Long Tail of my interests as represented by tags.

I tag stuff of interest to me > my tags express my interests > the distribution of my tags express the distribution of my interests > My mind is a powerlaw!

Source: alexbarnett.net blog : The Long Tail of Tags

The insight below reinforces some concepts I've been thinking about in terms of "tag mining" as a means to surface strong and weak ties within groups that are not aware of each other. This type of "soft discovery" creates linking opportunities from a social networking aspect that could encourage discovery of peers that are actually involved in similar activities.

Laws of the Long Tail of Tags

So based on the above, I propose the first two Laws of the Long Tail of Tags:

1. the frequency of a tags used by any user who is not required to follow a formalized taxonomy will follow a Long Tail powercurve disribution

and therefore

2. any tag tagged by a user has an >80% chance of being in that user's 'head' of their tagcloud Long Tail

Kind of obvious if you think about it, I suppose. But it hadn't occurred to me until I thought about tags in Long Tail terms.

Source: alexbarnett.net blog : The Long Tail of Tags

Now where was I...

Apologies from dropping off the grid so to speak, between the Burton Group Catalyst conference (around 1800 attendees by the way) where I had some speaking sessions to prepare for -- and some deliverables due this month (June, a collaboration tempalte for our reference architecture) -- and the CTC conference -- and one of my daughter's high school graduation -- things have been somewhat chaotic.

Finishing the thoughts on search vendors -- I highly recommend that people involved in collaboration strategies read the book, "Ambient Findability" by Peter Morville. I'm on the second read. It is a great read. Search is not about search. It is not about information access (as suggested by other industry pundits). It is about "findability". And what I found so intriguing (and frustrating at the same time), is that most best of breed search vendors have little clue as to the non-content aspects of search. Except for Google, IBM and Microsoft, none had any real story to tell about how search is improved by understanding and thinking of search in terms of "findability", rather than about content entity extraction, clustering and so on. None had a good story to tell for instance on how tags and social bookmarks might help people "connect" to information indirectly.

So if you are dealing with vendors such as Autonomy, Convera, Endeca, FAST and other best of breed vendors -- push them on this -- challenge them as to why they seem to have their heads in the sand when it comes to thinking more expansively and innovatively around search. Push them to think beyond over-simplified rationalizations that search is synonymous with information access.

Approach search as users do. Remember that search has many different experience patterns and is often an iterative activity over time. Appreciate the fact that sometimes search is not about the content but about content as a connection mechanism to interacting with other people or discovering activities of others doing similar work. Which gets back to my earlier point about thinking of search at a group level where people are acting collectively (whether they know it or not).

In other words -- think "findability".