August 25, 2005

Social Net Visualization

Timothy O'Brien briefly describes how he produced the cool images below in Visualizing the O'Reilly Connection Network using FOAF and Graphviz. He plans to release the code.

www.flickr.com

August 8, 2005

Evil Hierarchy vs. Good Tags

Peter Merholz takes on anti-ontological ideology in Clay Shirky's Viewpoints are Overrated.

Clay's whole argument predicates a black-and-white distinction between evil hierarchy on one side and good tags on the other... And while Clay is right to question hierarchy, and, particularly, Yahoo's less-than-optimal use of it, he neglects to distinguish truly useful forms of professionally-created classification and categorization, which undermines his argument. Source: peterme.com

These are simple formats that are sloppily extensible. Anyone who wants to can use these formats to consume content or to author content. Contrast this with the Semantic Web, which requires that you get a large group of people to agree on the schema of everything. Source: OnLamp

Here's a revolutionary concept: bottom-up and top-down approaches to developing theory and technology are not mutually exclusive.

August 2, 2005

Snippets: Domain-Focused Knowledge Sharing

Adam Smith would appreciate this simple design goal for the Snippet Manager:

Immediate Feedback

There should be an instant reward for the user who adds metadata. This conforms to idea that a tool should be useful to the user first, and to the community as a beneficial side effect. Source: How to Build a Snippet Manager

In this pdf and elsewhere, "facets " is gaining traction as an approach to creating and querying metadata. I hope this continues, because the popularity of tags increasingly reminds me of the "Trouble with Tribbles."