Experiencing Information

Gene Smith announced the release of his book on his blog (Atomiq). Unfortunately, it’s about twice as expensive if I buy it here in Germany than on the Amazon.com site. So I’m going to wait until I’m back in the US to get it…probably in May.

Check out Tagging: People-powered Metadata for the Social Web by Gene Smith.

Congratulations, Gene.

Looks like libraries are putting Designing Web Navigation under the LC Classification of TK5105.888. This is roughly:

• Technology
  • Electrical engineering. Electronics. Nuclear engineering
    • Telecommunication, including telegraphy, telephone, radio, radar, television.

The full call number in a given library might be something like TK5105.888 .K35 2007.

LC Subject Headings from several libraries include:

• Electronic texts
• Web site development
• Web sites–Design.
• World Wide Web
• User interfaces (Computer systems)
• Internet searching

Amazon has these subjects:

• Books > Computers & Internet > Microsoft > Web Browsers
• Books > Computers & Internet > Home Computing > Internet > Web Browsers
• Books > Computers & Internet > Graphic Design > Website Architecture & Usability

O’Reilly has it under on their site

• Web > Web Design

Libri.de has the subjects:

• User Interfaces
• Internet - Browsers
• Internet / Programmierung
• Internet - Web Site Design

Compare these to the tags on LibraryThing:

• $ Köp (1)
• Collib (1)
• computers (1)
• currently reading (1)
• design (1)
• faceted browse (1)
• information (1)
• iacanberra (1)
• information (1)
• information architecture (3)
• information seeking (1)
• labels (1)
• layout (1)
• library2 (1)
• navigation (3)
• non-fiction (2)
• organization (1)
• rias (1)
• rich web applications (1)
• search (1)
• tagging (1)
• to catalogue (1)
• to read (1)
• usability (2)
• user research (1)
• ux (2)
• visual design (1)
• web (2)
• web design

What does this tell us? Not 100% sure. Some of the controlled subject headings are off, like “Electronic texts” from LCSH and “Web browsers” from Amazon. So it’s hard to make a case that those are better access points.

The tags seem better to me, but perhaps too numerous. (Of course, I tagged the heck out of Designing Web Navigation on LibraryThing, so I’m contradicting myself). And except for a few personal tags, I actually find they are more descriptive of the book. There is information on tagging and facetted browse interfaces in the book, and that’s hard to show in most library subject headings.

So from this sample, the tags win out in for me.

In retrospect, I can’t figure out for the life in me why I didn’t mention Facetag during my talk at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin. I had plenty of time, and it’s something I cover in Designing Web Navigation. That and maybe some other more forward-looking ideas would have rounded out an otherwise (perhaps too?) practical talk.

Facetag is a working prototype of an application that mixes normal tagging with the power of facets. My friends from Italy developed it: Andrea Resmini, Emanuele Quintarelli, and Luca Rosati. With a little bit of additional effort, tags can be aligned with facets while tagging a web resource. Later, these facets allow you to filter the resources in different ways. It’s pretty straightforward, but very powerful at the same time.

The interesting thing for me is that I proposed a similar idea at the first German IA Conference in Frankfurt in 2005 refering to del.icio.us, which at the time had a sinlge flat list of tags. Not that I want to downplay Andrea, Emanuele, and Luca’s achievment–I’m far too incapable of actually getting such a project going–, but it does show the potential universal appeal of Facetag. I’ve heard of others who had similar ideas. The Lazy Web at work!

One thing that I called for back then were facets of intrinsic metadata: primarily date saved and domain name, but also things like domain extension. Facetag doesn’t have this (yet–or at least it didn’t when I asked them about it in Berlin in 2006). The thought is that you could potentially get a lot of mileage out of intrinsic metadata because users wouldn’t have to do anything extra while entering tags. So, if you bookmark lots of things from, say, Boxes and Arrows you could then zoom in on just links from www.boxesandarrows.com, and then potentially pick a certain date range or filter by another tag.

Ciao!

Over at atomiq, Gene has some interesting thoughts about why tagging isn’t stuck. I agree with him, and commented as such on his blog. Social bookmarking might be stuck, but tagging is just taking off, if you ask me. We’re really just starting to understand the potential of tagging. As long as sites like LibraryThing can keep coming up with cool features like the tag mirror, it’s got a bright future.

At the same time, let’s also keep in mind that tagging is really just more metadata. Where it comes from and why it’s there is different than owner-applied metadata or even technically generated metadata, but it’s still just metadata. In some cases, like on flickr, technorati, or LibraryThing, it wildly abundant metadata. And free. That’s what’s really different. If we can figure out how to really leverage those aspects, tagging may indeed become a disruptive technology.

Gene’s got a lot to say about the topic–so much so that he’s writing a book on the subject. Can’t wait for that one. I was fortunate to have Gene read and comment on an early draft of Chapter 12 of Designing Web Navigation, which is about tagging. Thanks, Gene.

Tim Spalding, creator of LibraryThing, has come up with something new that’s quite interesting. It’s called the tag mirror. Essentially, you get to see other people’s tags for your books. Great idea.

Here’s my tag mirror (I’m Pivo1 on LibraryThing). No real surprises, but there are some interesting connections. Not sure where “Christmas”came from. The “Geek” tag might also say something about my book collection–at least those that I have on LibraryThing.

I suspect there are loads of such filters and ways of structuring tags that have yet to be explored. We’re really only just beginning. With 22 million tags and inventive tagging mechanisms like the tag mirror, LibraryThing is a clear leader in this area. Keep your eye on Tim in the future.