MetaMuse

Are You Web 2.0 Too?

I guess I've been out of the loop, because I've been hearing about  "Web 2.0" quite a bit since I've been back in Seattle. Frankly, I didn't know what it was until I just looked it up on Wikipedia, and then read more by Tim O'Reilly. Great stuff, but I find it oddly flattering that while I didn't know what the label was, everything that I find interesting about the Web today is exactly Web 2.0. Furthermore, all the principles that I seek to incorporate into Others Online are Web 2.0. I am SOOO Web 2.0 and I didn't even know it! Such value in validation, isn't there ....

Yes, It's Happening Again ...

On December 1 I made my decision to start another company, which will be my 4th technology startup (and the 3rd I founded). This plan had been in my head for quite some time now, yet I waffled a bit because I just wasn't ready to make the psychological, emotional and physical commitment. It takes so much out of you. But now I am completely and entirely engaged, and so excited about this project. The more I get my head around the current market space, the more I know the time is right. This is going to be my best project yet!. But stealth I must remain, at least until the patent application is filed!

Collaborative Tagging Systems

Interesting couple of research papers I just read on consumer-generated tagging (keyword descriptions of their own content) vs. following a structured taxonomy. First was The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems, where the key takeaway for me was just how few users were necessary (less than 250) to reduce the number of unique tags to less than a dozen. This is significant to any startup with a model that leverages consumer-generated tagged content -- one begins to see overlaps in content/keywords immediately. From this paper, I went to an interesting paper titled Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata, which compares what he calls "folksonomies" (comprised of terms in a flat namespace: that is, there is no hierarchy, and no directly specified parent-child or sibling relationships between these terms) to formal taxonomies and classification schemes.

The core benefits of consumer-generated tagging vs. formal taxonomies (to describe content) is:

• One need far fewer users to see overlaps in tags (non uniqueness) and therefore an actual usable browsing experience. The number of tags grow only as the content grows.
• Your users control the vocabularies and classifications, instead of one central body of governance. The uncontrolled nature and organic growth of these tags therefore responds very quickly to user vocabulary changes and needs.
• There is no cost of maintaining a "folksonomy". I like the quote from Stewart Butterfield (one of the creators of Flickr): "Free typing loose associations is just a lot easier than making a decision about the degree of match to a pre-defined category (especially hierarchical ones). It’s like 90% of the value of a ‘proper’ taxonomy but 10 times simpler.”
• Feedback is immediate. As soon as one person assigns a tag to some content, you see a cluster of itmes carrying the same tag.
• Organic tag creation or "unintended uses". Only in this type of system can the users agree on the use of nonwords to aptly describe content.