Comments on social tagging

This talk is about some possible future developments for social tagging.

1. User-organised news. Working with user-tagged BBC news stories, linking to external sites, user-driven related stories. This works through Backstage, allowing people to do things with the BBC content. Tagging works in a similar way to Flickr tagging, allowing you to tag stories, and see the stories other people have tagged with same terms.

2. Local Aggregation. Local aggregator pulling news, blogs, links, photos etc. So removes need for an editor to create the page, allows the page to pull things in. text analysis derives common themes. Can monitor local issues and encourage participation.

3.Negotiating Meaning: knowledge sharing extranet, multifaceted classifications; allows users to create own terms to organise content; allows users to build bottom-up classification

4. Negotiating language. learning from unstructured data. Text analysis identified matches with formal taxonomies, build user generated tag clouds from the information to learn users language,

Some really good stuff here to try and get more use out of the stories people say, instead of asking for structure dfeedback, where people can give the information that they think the collectors are after. deriving order from chaos.

Good challenge to companies that want to organsie all data, getting their people to fit into a fixed taxonomy. Use technology to let taxonomy emerge, move “outside the taxonomy deadzone” So dont’t use things like Sharepoint (hooray, please, no more sharepoint) but let the information come to life.

So this is all on Headshift