Blogger's Massive Fail

I can't believe this. When posting the previous entry, I got this message:

Blogger currently allows a maximum of 10 labels per post, and 2000 labels per blog. To get rid of this message, you will have to correct the appropriate label counts.

It seems that I have exceeded my quota of 2000 labels per blog: how insane is that? How can I limit myself to a set number of labels given that the world moves on and new ideas come along that need new labels.

Time to explore those export options....

A Moot of Folksonomies

Being a rigorous sort of chap, I was sceptical about folksonomies - ad-hoc tags. But over time I've come to appreciate their power - and the fact that once people start using them routinely, the combined body of folksonomic knowledge becomes quite impressive.

But the obvious question is: what lies beyond the simple tag? Myabe this kind of thing:

GroupMe! extends the idea of social tagging systems like del.icio.us, Flickr or BibSonomy by introducing the group dimension. The foundation of social tagging systems are so-called folksonomies, which describe how users (folks) tag resources (e.g. photos, videos, publications, etc.). In technical terms a folksonomy is just a collection of tag assignments:

(User, Tag, Resource) = User has tagged Resource with Tag at a particular time.

Over time it is likely that semantics emerge, e.g. tags that are often assigned to same resources may be synonyms. Hence, folksonomies are promising to improve (web) search, etc. With GroupMe!'s approach of taggable groups we extend tag assignments with a group dimension:

(User, Tag, Group, Resource) = User has tagged Resource with Tag in a certain Group at a particular time.

This prompts the next question: what do we call these groups? I vote a "moot".

Tagging Second Life

Tags have proved one of the most powerful Web 2.0 ideas. They let everyone add their pebble to the cairn of taxonomy, creating a rich tapestry of knowledge that would be impossible to match using automated means (well, with the current state of AI, at least).

Tags are a kind of signpost in semantic space, so an obvious extension would be to tag other kinds of space - for example, the virtual one of Second Life. Enter the LandRing, which lets you do exactly that. It's another product of the fertile mind of Timeless Prototype, and it's being made available through the Multi Gadget - here are the details.

Squirl It Away - Forever, Please

A little while back I wrote about LibraryThing which lets you catalogue, tag and share information about your books. Obviously, it's a model that can be applied to other domains, and that's what the wittily-named Squirl has done. However, I'm not entirely sure we should be encouraging people to drag this kind of thing out into the harsh light of day.

Unreal Mashups

This is getting seriously weird.

DestroyTV lets RLers watch an island in SL, using an embedded video camera (which is "in" both SL and RL). There are also screenshots (several thousand of them), over on Flickr, complete with a tag cloud. So which world are we in now?

Going Down a FlickrStorm

I'm a big fan of Flickr, even if I don't have much call to use it. Perhaps one reason for that is that it's a bit of a pain finding stuff: tags are only approximate at the best of times. I think I might start using it some more thanks to FlickrStorm (update: now Wunderstock), a kind of search engine plus:

It works by looking for more than what you enter to find related and more relevant images... Be surprised!

When I gave it a whirl, I won't say I was deeply surprised, but maybe pleasantly so, on the basis of both the images it found, and the rather cool way it displayed them, with a scrollable set of thumbnails on the left that bring up the main photo on the right remarkably quickly. Worth taking a look. (Via OpenBusiness.)

Amazon Plays Tag, Blog and Wiki

For all its patent faults, Amazon.com is one of my favourite sites. It has repeatedly done the right thing when mistakes have been made with my orders, to the extent that I can even forgive them for doing the wrong thing when it comes to (IP) rights....

So I was interested to see that Amazon.com now lets users add tags to items: I first noticed this on Rebel Code, where some public-minded individual has kindly tagged it as open source, free software and linux. Clicking on one of these brings up a listing of other items similarly tagged (no surprise there). It also cross-references this with the customers who used this tag, and the other tags that are used alongside the tag you are viewing (a bit of overkill, this, maybe).

I was even more impressed to see a ProductWiki at the foot of the Rebel Code page (it's rather empty at the moment). This is in addition to the author's blog (which I don't have yet because Amazon insists on some deeply arcane rite to establish I am really the Glyn Moody who wrote Rebel Code and not his evil twin brother from a parallel universe). Mr. Bezos certainly seems to be engaging very fully with the old Web 2.0 stuff; it will be interesting to see how other e-commerce sites respond.