Dennis McDonald's Blog

I’m using the Faviki bookmarking service to manage bookmarks related to my “technological literacy” research.

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At last night’s Meeting VI of the Alexandria Web Strategy Discussion Group, convened at New Target in Alexandria, Virginia, Maddie Grant raised the topic of RSS feeds. She’s tried a number of readers and now she uses Google Reader. Still, she complains about the problems with setting up readers and especially the challenges of explaining the process to other users. In her mind, RSS has not lived up to its promise.

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By Dennis D. McDonald

How important are the tags you assign to the things you write and publish online? And how important are tags to your finding useful information online?

I thought about these questions when I read Sarah Perez’ Semantic Tagging with Faviki. Faviki,  a new social bookmarking service, suggests what tags to use based on structured data extracted from Wikipedia into an online database called DBpedia.

Unlike services such as del.icio.us, Faviki-suggested tags incorporate a structured tagging vocabulary that has been created and maintained through a communal effort of experts. For example, Faviki prompts you to use a tag such as “coca-cola” instead of “cocacola.” The former term has been incorporated into the DBpedia database along with references to explicit Wikipedia locations for this reference, and this is the term that is recommended.

It’s easy to see the supposed benefits of such an approach to tagging: consistency in assigning tags should make it easier to share information with other people, and relating tags to a structured area of knowledge should make the tag maintenance process easier to perform for those responsible for updating the tags.

While controlled indexing vocabularies and classifications schemes have existed for as long as indexes, catalogs, and information retrieval systems have existed, the benefits of such controlled vocabularies have been somewhat limited to professional and specialized communities or other organizations that already have a vested interest in standard ways of referring to concepts and ideas. Once authorship and usage extend beyond such communities — which happens very easily online — it’s possible that the advantages of standardization, specialization, and specificity of tags might start to break down as profession- and knowledge-based borders are crossed. 

This is sort of a “chicken and egg” situation where, it seems to me,  you need to understand enough about a discipline in order to make the best possible use of a set of structured tags that relate to that discipline. 

On the other hand, a service like Faviki explicitly relies on a tool (DBpedia) that is based on a cross-disciplinary tool like Wikipedia. That suggests that there could exist an underlying cross-disciplinary framework that makes it simpler to cross over community and discipline based boundaries.

But will this be obvious to casual users of Faviki tags? Maybe, maybe not. But I certainly intend to try it out.

• Copyright (c) 2008 by Dennis D. McDonald 

While tracking adoption of "web 2.0" applications such as internal blogs, wikis, and social book marking systems by large organizations, I'm seeing a couple of factors emerging that, anecdotally at least, appear to be associated with successful adoption.

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A couple of days ago I received an email from Michael Cohn telling me he had used Google's Co-Op service to develop a custom Google search engine of independent film reviews. (A section of my blog is devoted to my occasional movie and DVD reviews.) Here is the link he supplied, which will take you to a page he calls "The Independent Film Reviewer Search Engine":

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In a previous post I commented on the need to take into account, when developing strategies for implementing enterprise content management (ECM) systems, how social media can support not only internal and external corporate communications but also corporate innovation processes. In this post I discuss some of the issues associated with defining and assigning ownership and responsibility for such systems.

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No, I'm not stopping my blog reading. I'm referring to the "blogs" folder that has been sitting in the upper left hand corner of my Firefox browser's Navigation Toolbar for I don't know how long.

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Jon Udell's January 25, 2007 blog post Unintended consequences of syndication is an interesting read, especially if you're trying to figure out your personal bookmarking strategy.

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Luis Suarez recently blogged and podcasted about social bookmarking services. He highly recommends BLINKLIST, a service that I have not used. I have been using RAWSUGAR, COGENZ, and CONNECTBEAM, so I also have been forming some personal opinions about social bookmarking.

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