Steal this bookmark!?

Posted on February 10, 2005 by George Pór

Thierry Nabeth of INSEAD has just alerted me of a new social networking phenomenon called “tagging”. In his message there was a reference to a Salon.com article in which Howard Rheingold said about tagging:
“It’s like Friendster for knowledge as far as I’m concerned. I look to see who the other people are on del.icio.us who tag the same things that I think are important. Then, I can look and see what else they’ve tagged … And isn’t that part of the collective intelligence of the Web? You meet people who find things that you find interesting and useful — and that multiplies your ability to find things that are interesting and useful, and other people feed off of you.”
I think using tags for growing collective intelligence requires more than a clever technology. Unless we think of CI in the statistical sense (as in The Wisdom of Crowds), it requires the art of integrating the triple network of People, Knowledge, and Technology. Tags (bookmarks referring to the same subjects) collected from millions of bloggers are not more useful than a Google search that turns up over a million pages in response to my query. When somebody comes up with a way to integrate tagging with my trusted circle of friends and colleagues, then CI got a potent new tool, indeed. Technically, it shouldn’t be difficult and I’d be surprised if an innovative social network host would not be already working on it.

This entry was posted in Technologies That Support CI. Bookmark the permalink.

8 Responses to Steal this bookmark!?

Wally Glutton says:

February 10, 2005 at 5:41 pm

I archive bookmarks via spurl.net and del.icio.us.
When searching the web for very specific info, I always search through the spurl.net archives, (all user-spurled pages are cached), before I use google.
The Spurl results are “pre-approved” (not the best word, pre-enjoyed maybe?) and lead to much higher quality results.

LikeLike

Reply
pad says:

February 10, 2005 at 10:17 pm

Hi George.
“Tag … You’re It!”
That is the saying of the standard childs game.
So way back someone already created the technology you are talking about in the blog update. That someone was probably under the age of seven.
If we watch how children build their collective knowledge, intelligence, wisdom etc we’ll see that the big people are trying to do the same without the childsplay.
Trying to create a techincal substitute for basic social intercourse is a noble pursuit and worthy of lots of programming time. While doing that the CI people could take time out and a few moments doing the real thing over a coffee, tea or just a walk in the park and see what or whom tags them.
As always your stuff is thought provoking.
Regards PAD

LikeLike

Reply
pad says:

February 10, 2005 at 10:18 pm

Hi George.
“Tag … You’re It!”
That is the saying of the standard childs game.
So way back someone already created the technology you are talking about in the blog update. That someone was probably under the age of seven.
If we watch how children build their collective knowledge, intelligence, wisdom etc we’ll see that the big people are trying to do the same without the childsplay.
Trying to create a techincal substitute for basic social intercourse is a noble pursuit and worthy of lots of programming time. While doing that the CI people could take time out and a few moments doing the real thing over a coffee, tea or just a walk in the park and see what or whom tags them.
As always your stuff is thought provoking.
Regards PAD

LikeLike

Reply
mark ranford says:

February 12, 2005 at 6:05 am

Hi George, You say
“…requires the art of integrating the triple network of People, Knowledge, and Technology. Tags (bookmarks referring to the same subjects) collected from millions of bloggers are not more useful than a Google search that turns up over a million pages in response to my query…”
Del.icio.us does integrate p-k-t its the most basic interface/tool ive ever used.. but if you use it you will see that it does in fact combine those 3 elements veru effectively..Please play with Tags, I think you will agree they are already a really important tool for CI, and will become ever more so as things get built around them. I see them providing a kind of holopticism … they let all individuals see the collective zeitgeist in play.. one which involves each and every ones own contributions. Google search is a view of the past.. Tag search is a view of the present and future, whats interesting right now.. a very different outcome from search.. not only that they are extremely social.. even more social than blogs.. blogs let you build a network with others blogging on shared interests over a period of time. Tags let you zoom in on a relevant group of peeople sharing your interest much much faster.. Dont forget rss is part of this.. you can serach any intersection of tags to keep you right on the pulse of your field of interest.. you can also subscribe to people and follow up what their interested in.. It really is as close to the pulse of the zeitgiest as you can get.. del.icio.us/tag/popular will give you a view of what is hot this very moment.. google gets a view over a far longer period going back.. and its dominated by pop cultre.. I guarantee that once you explore tags (essentially try them out a while) you will be convinced they are a critical new CI tool. In fact the applications are endless.. some want to replace trackbacks with tagbacks, some are using them to gather all their previously dispersed comments around the web and pull them via rss back into their weblogs. Im using tags as a poor mans meta data architecture (who needs expensive EIS anymore) for an exploration / pilot KM project.. rss/blogs/tags give me everything I need to build a fluid knowledge sharing community. if you want Im happy to explore further exactly how CI can best leverage CI.. I find this really exciting and believe we are fortunate to be at the beginning of something incredibly important.. All the best, Mark.. ps I’ll hit my delicious popup bookmarklet and tag this page:
“CI Collective Intelligence tags KM comments”
note the last tag, comments, allows me to get this page pulled into my comments feed at a later date, along with everything else I’ve ever written .. In a way Im recovering the bits of me…. the trails in web space that were previousl disconnected and lost.. I can now bring them home 🙂

LikeLike

Reply
Ed Daniel says:

March 2, 2005 at 11:09 am

Of note on the tagging front is a new community model called http://www.43things.com – here people post their goals and CREATE tags for them which other people can then use to discover similar goals.

LikeLike

Reply
George Por says:

March 2, 2005 at 12:31 pm

Ed, thanx 4 the link; I’ve just joined http://www.43things.com . May it go ALL the way of community self-organization towards higher order complexity!

LikeLike

Reply
james says:

March 8, 2005 at 6:39 pm

And to add to all the other tag resources
see how a flash interface and images combined with tags produced http://www.flickr.com
and mapping the images using locative tags declaring location in http://www.mappr.com
j

LikeLike

Reply
Josef Davies-Coates says:

March 26, 2005 at 6:40 am

http://www.aggregato.com is also well worth a look. Like delicious, but for RSS feeds.
What I’d like to see is a plugin/extension that will crawl my bookmarks in delicious and automagically add their feeds to my aggregato account.
Lots of very cool delicious plugins already exist.
You’ll find links to details in my delicious bookmarks on delicous: http://del.icio.us/qopi/delicious

LikeLike

Reply