Group items tagged

"The debate within the Web community over the optimal means by which to organize information often pits formalized classications against distributed collaborative tagging systems. A number of questions remain unanswered, however, regarding the nature of collaborative tagging systems including whether coherent categorization schemes can emerge from unsupervised tagging by users. This paper uses data from the social bookmarking site del.icio.us to examine the dynamics of collaborative tagging systems. In particular, we examine whether the distribution of the frequency of use of tags for “popular” sites with a long history (many tags and many users) can be described by a power law distribution, often characteristic of what are considered complex systems. We produce a generative model of collaborative tagging in order to understand the basic dynamics behind tagging, including how a power law distribution of tags could arise. We empirically examine the tagging history of sites in order to determine how this distribution arises over time and to determine the patterns prior to a stable distribution. Lastly, by focusing on the high-frequency tags of a site where the distribution of tags is a stabilized power law, we show how tag co-occurrence networks for a sample domain of tags can be used to analyze the meaning of particular tags given their relationship to other tags."

The paper shows that the tags users choose are not chaotic, but rather quickly converge to a common descriptive set of tags that is almost unchanging over time. Perhaps once the tags have stabilized, coherent URI-based identification schemes could emerge?

Nice paper, thanks. Categories / tags / subjects / topics / issues ... that's what I'm working with right now. p.s. sure would be nice if the email notification included the source URL. I'm far more likely to download the PDF when I see something like www2007.org/paper635.pdf

"The Institute of the Future will soon be launching what it calls the first massively multiplayer forecast game, billed as The Superstruct Game. According to the game's FAQ, the idea is to 'imagine how we might solve the problems we'll face.' Interestingly, the game itself is meant to be played 'on forums, blogs, videos, wikis, and other familiar online spaces.' From the IFTF website's sneak peak, the game is set in the year 2019, where the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS) has forecast the possibility of human extinction by the year 2042 as the result of five simultaneous 'super-threats:' Quarantine, which is a result from 'declining health and pandemic disease;' Ravenous, which relates to the global collapse of the world food system; Power Struggle, related to the flux of power 'as nations fight for energy supremacy and the world searches for alternative energy solutions;' Outlaw Planet, covering increased surveillance and loss of liberties; and, lastly, Generation Exile, which covers the massive increase in refugees."

In my previous article, I introduced the Map/Reduce model as a powerful model for parallelism. However, although Map/Reduce is simple, powerful, and provides a good opportunity to parallelize algorithm, it is based on a rigid procedural structure that requires injection of custom user code and therefore it is not easy to understand the big picture from a high level. You need to drill into the implementation code of the map and reduce functions in order to figure out what is going on.

As it tracks and analyzes thought and actions across the world, the Global Power Barometer (GPB) frequently catches sight of issues that will impact global politics. These are the issues that likely will move the icons in coming weeks. We'll share our peeks at the future as they pass certain momentum thresholds. In future days we'll categorize the "Emerging Issues" and provide snippets about the progress of significant trends.

Open Context features an innovative folksonomy system that will encourage individual users to add value to the information in Open Context. This powerful social software allows users to add meaningful tags (keywords) to data they discover in their searches.

RPI's Tetherless World Constellation will address this emerging area of "Web Science," focusing on the World Wide Web and it's future use. Faculty in the constellation will explore the research and engineering principles that underlie the Web, will enhance the Web's reach beyond the desktop and laptop computer, and will develop new technologies and languages that expand the capabilities of the Web. We will use powerful scientific and mathematical techniques from many disciplines to explore the modeling of the Web from network- and information- centric views. Our goals will include making the next generation web natural to use while being responsive to the growing variety of policy and social needs, whether in the area of privacy, intellectual property, general compliance, or provenance. The Tetherless World Constellation will design new techniques to explore social, scientific, and legal impacts of the evolving technologies deployed on the Web.

Vannevar Bush's 1945 article, "As We May Think," has been much celebrated as a central inspiration for the development of hypertext and the World Wide Web. Less attention, however, has been paid to Bush's motivation for imagining a new generation of information technologies; it was his hope that more powerful tools, by automating the routine aspects of information processing, would leave researchers and other professionals more time for creative thought. But now, more than sixty years later, it seems clear that the opposite has happened, that the use of the new technologies has contributed to an accelerated mode of working and living that leaves us less to think, not more. In this talk I will explore how this state of affairs has come about and what we can do about it.

But I've never seen a service that brings social bookmarking and semantic search together the way AntStorm does. The service works on two major fronts: first, AntStorm allows you to upload your bookmarks, tag them, share them, and access them from any computer you choose, and second, AntStorm uses your tagged bookmarks to power a semantic search engine that will help you find new sites and services that match your interests.

Sensemaking systems don't only help people find stuff faster. That's just the information retrieval part. The bigger story is about augmenting and amplifying our abilities to make sense. Sensemaking adds things like skimming, power reading, organizing, spotting patterns, tracing social networks, taking notes, summarizing, drilling for details, and flagging biases. Reading an article is different from reading a book, and that's different from reading from a collection or stream. Radically new forms of human-information interaction are being enabled by these new technologies. Sensemaking systems not only have front ends (visualization), but also back ends (content analytics and reasoning).

The mistake is that semantic search engines present us with Google-like search box and allow us to enter free form queries. So we type the things that we are used to asking - primitive queries. It never occurs to us to type in What actor starred in both Pulp Fiction and Saturday Night Fever? or What two US Senators received donations from a foreign entity? We type simple questions, but this is not where the power of semantic search lies. Lets look at the spectrum of semantic technologies from Google, to SearchMonkey, to Powerset, and Freebase to understand what is going on.

Zotero is an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. An extension to the popular open-source web browser Firefox, Zotero includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)-the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references-and the best parts of modern software and web applications (like iTunes and del.icio.us), such as the ability to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero integrates tightly with online resources; it can sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other object on the web, and-on many major research and library sites-find and automatically save the full reference information for the item in the correct fields. Since it lives in the web browser, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other web services and applications; since it runs on one's personal computer, it can also communicate with software running there (such as Microsoft Word). And it can be used offline as well (e.g., on a plane, in an archive without WiFi).

Using stories to trigger conversations and intepretations of behaviours is powerful.

Our focus is on what we are finding to be a powerful and intruiging intersection: the meeting of Hypermedia and Discourse - both theory and technology. Our interests are conceptual, and intensely practical: understanding and practicing the co-evolution of new digital media and practices for discussing and arguing about problems.

zembly is a new kind of application development environment that lends the power of the crowd to you, so you can do more, faster. It's kind of like a wiki, but for applications.

MarkMail is a free service for searching mailing list archives, with huge advantages over traditional search engines. It is powered by MarkLogic Server: Each email is stored internally as an XML document, and accessed using XQuery. All searches, faceted navigation, analytic calculations, and HTML page renderings are performed by a small MarkLogic Server cluster running against millions of messages.

Central to Web 2.0 is the requirement for interactive systems to enable the participation of users in production and social interaction. Consequently, in order to critically explore the Web 2.0 phenomenon it is important to explore the relationship of interactivity to social power. This study firstly characterises interactivity in these media using Barry's (2001) framework differentiating interactivity from disciplining technologies as defined by Foucault. Contrary to Barry's model though, the analysis goes on to explore how interactivity may indeed function as a disciplining technology within the framework of a neoliberal political economy.

ILIAS is a powerful web-based learning management system that allows you to easily manage learning resources in an integrated system.

E15 is an experimental architecture that places the power of presentation of web content into the hands of those that use it. Based on a dynamic, interactive OpenGL-based scripting engine, E15 exposes an entirely new face to web content, freely modifiable by each individual user.

Social bookmarking is a powerful tool in promoting a website. But going through all of those social bookmarking sites is very time-consuming and downloading all toolbars is madness! That's where SocialMarker.com comes in, the free service designed to reduce the time and effort needed to socially bookmark a website.

Apache ActiveMQ is the most popular and powerful open source Message Broker and Enterprise Integration Patterns provider.