KNITTING TAG CLOUDS FOR GRANDMA -- BEYOND FOLKSONOMIES

Look up who the people are later
"I'm Liz Lawley and my blog is not my identity"
There is a website of this, but they don't mention what it is -- ah, appears to 
be http://www.beyondfolksonomies.com/wordpress/

"More an exploration than an exposition" -- they'll meet downstairs later for 
people to hang out and chat and stuff after 1230

FOLKSONOMY -- a bottom-up way for organising information; low-level way to make 
meaning of things; more general than taxonomy
TAXONOMY -- formal, top-down, specific way of organising information

Folksonomy can just be a fancy word for language -- but Liz Lawley disagrees: 
she thinks it's a way of classifying things
We learn an existing, structured, language as children -- folksonomies are 
interesting because people get to invent and develop their own
Predominant structure of language is defined, but we get new words every day -- 
e.g. folksonomy, blog, etc etc

People who emigrate to a new area learn a new language in a different way -- 
pidgen speech; however their children develop a compound created grammar
Need context to get better understanding of what is being talked about

Wants us to find tools and practices to give folksonomies "a grammar"
Example folksonomies -- Flickr, del.icio.us, technorati, tagging

There's a usability/standardization issues -- everybody is growing their own 
tagging tool so we're not getting to anything that is broadly useful
Not a lot of people seem to be putting a lot of energy into putting just the 
right information in there
We need to give people the right amount of stuff and the stuff that's really 
meaningful to them
Her fear about brainstorming for more features is that we're still not making 
it USEFUL

The whole thing is about giving more structure to folksonomies -- merging 
folksonomies and taxonomies
Want to add in context to links/tags
They don't really seem clear how or what they want to do
It's a bit of a crap panel, to be honest

Attention Recorder
www.attentiontrust.org
Very interesting in terms of looking at how you spend your time -- what you 
look at, how much time you spend at each site, etc
Think that's far afield of beyond folksonomy
Hodder isn't a big fan of automated tagging
Dabble 	-- video remix community; allows you to bookmark videos online and save 
them; help you optimise for video
	-- still in inviter beta
	-- collecting citations to video (approx 70 000) --> in terms of tagging about 
half of the sites included had tagging features
	-- 10 000 of the 70 000 videos are local to someone's blog --> 53% of the 
videos have tags
	-- very low number of tagged videos because it's hard to make tags on a blog 
post
	-- on the sites that have the tagging option there is almost 100% tagged
	-- more important to tag rich media (comics, photos, video, audio), you need 
to tag to help people find it
	-- tags and duration are the key elements in deciding whether to watch 
something
	-- somebody having to think about the context IS the value
	-- automated tagging won't be as valuable

Swedlow is saying that we need implicit tagging so we have MORE tags, but I 
think we need to have more PEOPLE tagging!!

Also interesting to find the people who you respect -- whose tags you want to 
get a hold of and pay attention to

The real issue here is making it possible for average people to effortlessly 
tag things
People need to see a big return on investment -- people don't have complicated 
folder structures because it's FUN, but because they think it'll help them find 
things at a later date
Sometimes it's more about accuracy than congruence -- sometimes you want to 
read the guy who disagrees with you absolutely, then it's an accurate predictor

How do we make this useful for everyone -- it needs to be experienced as useful
Need filter upon filter using the tags
Emergently and continually navigating to go down

Good comment: The folksonomy and taxonomy are BOTH interesting, needed and 
useful

KEY TAKE-OUT: To take us beyond folksonomies, we need to get the wider 
population involved and drinking the Kool-Aid

----------------

TAIL END OF BETTER BLOGGING BRAINSTORMS

Lots of what people are reading and responding to could be fodder for later 
work in their academic career
MJ figures her writing sparks longer columns etc sometimes, so perhaps 
academics are more scared about ideas being stolen
There's a lot of resistance in academia because someone has been denied tenure 
because he was spending too much time blogging and not enough time publishing 
work
Blogging as a knowledge management system is different to normal blogging in 
some ways

Is there a disconnect between online and offline publishing?
When do bloggers become writers?

Blogging is really an emerging literary form -- quality of writing can be 
fantastic; the form itself is very interesting as well
Self-publishing through Cafepress can be very useful as well -- people who are 
going to buy your book have probably read your blog!
The publishing world can build you an audience, but if you have one already why 
do you need them?
The rest of us are better off selling to our readers at our own prices in our 
own way