As I have been raving on about, everything is social these days. It seem like everyone is connected through facebook, linkedIn and other networks. I have connected with folks I haven’t seen for 20 year, and its actually quite interesting.
Talking about Facebook…
LoL
There’s a discussion on the DC-SOCIAL TAGGING mailingslist about what so social about social tagging.
Many interesting viewpoints have emerged. It started with a question by Liddy Nevile:
I would like us to think carefully again about calling it social tagging - I suspect that ’social’ tagging has a theoretical implication - that it’s tagging done ‘for society’ or ‘by society’ and we should not be careless about these terms. Different motivation might mean different ways of thinking about and using the process of tagging.
What do you think???
Tagging may be social or “non-social”. It becomes “social” when it’s - to some degree at least - “negotiated”
And put a refernce to a post he made back in November 2006: The “social” in social tagging
My thoughts on the matter is that the process of adding tags to resources, does not have to be social (as I defined in an earlier post about what does social means), but it can be. On the other hand the collection of all the users applied tags must be some sort of social organization. It becomes social when it no longer just concerns one user, but is something that involves many users and the ties between them. I find that the social aspect starts when one see the tags as something that is tying users together.
It seems like people use many different tools to get through everyday life. The last couple of days I looked deeper into what tools I use in my work. All software applications are excluded, I probably must make a new list of them.
So here’s a list of some of the hardware I use in my work:
White board
A White board is a great tool for seeing connections and thinking. I probably use mine most to think about ideas/problems. I draw/write them on the white board, and then I walk (literally) around my office looking at the white board - It usually helps.
Pencil
I use a Caran d’Ache fixpencil 3. When I was a child, I used to go with my farther to his work on Saturdays. My father is an architect, and he always used these kinds of pencils, so naturally enough I always drew with them. Last year my father asked me what I wanted for Christmas, all I could say was “‘One of your pencils”. And I got one - Thanx Dad :-D
Journal
Moleskine cahier journal (soft cover, extra Large: 19 x 25 cm)
Which always are with me, ready for new ideas to be plotted down.
Post It (7 x 12 cm)
Post-it are superb for plotting down ideas at night (when its dark). This way I don’t wake up my family, just because I wake up with an idea to measure tags.
Mobile Phone
I use a Nokia N73 mobile phone with extended 2 gb. memory card. The two main uses of my phone is: Calendar (synchronized with Outlook) and the camera (Carl Zeiss optics) I use this device to keep track of meetings and to document my every day life by uploading to my flickr account.
One of the reasons for me to buy just this phone was N73s ability to take pictures in poor lightening conditions.
Laptop
I use a HP Compaq nc8430 which suits my needs. I am not really a tech geek when it comes to computers, I am satisfied when I can trust the machine.
Theres probably many tools which I forgotten to write about.
My supervisor Jesper Schneider asked me “What does social mean?” the other day. Thats actually a very good question. So here I list some definitions, while I ponder my definition of social.
Wikipedia has many more or less helpfull definitions. In the introduction there’s a rather good sentence
“…its meaning is at times vague, suggesting that it is a fuzzy concept.”
Another is that social means Interactions between people (social interaction)
The German Wikipedia has a better definition
“In der Umgangssprache bedeutet „sozial“ den Bezug einer Person auf eine oder mehrere andere Personen”
[In colloquial language social means the reference of a person to one or more other persons] Translated by me
Oxford English Dictionary says social is the
“Capable of being associated or united to others”
“United by some common tie”
Oxford Dictionary of Sports Science & Medicine in Medicine [requires login]:
“Pertaining to the interaction humans have with one another, either as individuals or in groups.”
Good old Merriam Webster dictionary:
“…of or relating to human society, the interaction of the individual and the group…”
It seems like the term social only mostly is defined by the a jointing term. Social interaction is clearly described in many dictionaries while social tends to lack proper definition.
So what is social in the context of my research?
Social tagging: is a term often used for user generated metadata, the action where a user index an information object. What so social about the actual indexing (tagging)? I truly believe the result of the tagging, the folksonomy is some sort of manifestation of a social nature, but the process of tagging is an individual action. Maybe the folksonomy can be regarded as a social organization (thank you Jesper for the definition).
I don’t think I come any closer to a definition right now - But the quest continues.
A study by Millen & Feinberg (2006) investigates how social bookmarking can improve social navigation in organizations. Social navigation is the process where a user is driven to a certain action by the direct or indirect suggestion by other users. So a social bookmarking application can be seen as a possibility for social navigation because users can gain insight in other users bookmark. The study is situated at IBM, and are employing the social bookmark tool Dogear. As a method the study uses log file analysis to grab data about the users’ information behaviour.
Problem defined:
• How does Dogear support social navigation?
Methods used:
By log file analysis the users information behaviour were charted. Log file analysis is the analysis of user logs stored on a server (for more on this subject see the discussion section of this paper). The log files were from a 8 month period and consisted of 2579 users and 58532 bookmarks in Dogear. Included in the log file were the following user actions: creating-, deleting- and editing a bookmark, bookmark clicks, user bookmark owner identifier and a date- and timestamp.
Findings:
98,7 % of the users used tag of people links to browse trough the bookmark collection. The most frequently used way to browse bookmarks were to click on another user’s name.
Discussion:
Millen & Feinberg (2006) states that they among other methods use log file analysis to study user’s information behaviour. I think that log file analysis is a powerful tool which can give data about user actions on a particular website/information system. A log file analysis consists of an analysis of a series of user log files (Haigh & Megarity, 1998). These user log files are server stored data about user browser request to the server. When a user wants to view a web page, the users internet browser makes a request to the server the webpage is hosted by. In this request there are system data about the user.
Normally this data is:
This user log data is stored on the server every time the browser makes a request for data. So if a user activate a hyperlink on a web page, and immediately regrets the action and activates another hyperlink (or clicks stop in the browser), this is registered as a visit on the web page. There are off course many way that this data could be filtered out. That is why, any log file study need to be very explicit in the description of the method used.
There are several challenges with using log file analysis in regard to measuring users’ information behaviour. Two major issues concerning the log file study’s reliability and validity shall be mentioned here.
The first one is about using log files as a measure of web traffic. As a server log, consist of requests made to the server, the users accidental click on a hyperlink is registered as a visit and a view of the page in question. There is of course many ways the secure validity in this, but Millen &Feinberg (2006) do not describe how they collected the user data, which methods they used as data filtering or how they made the log file analysis.
Another challenge in using log files to investigate users information behaviour is mentioned by Ingwersen & Järvelin (2005), who warn about using log file analysis alone and not combining it with other more qualitative approaches. A log file lacks the ability to say anything about the user’s intensions and thoughts during the transaction (p. 248). So to say that the users wants or likes to use a certain system (here Dogear) from a log file analysis is interpreting the data. But I like the study nevertheless, and not just because the results suits me ;-)
References:
Haigh, S., Megarity, J. (1998). Measuring web site usage: log file analysis. In: National Library of Canada, August 4,
URL: http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/9/1/p1-256-e.html
Ingwersen, P., Järvelin, K. (2005). The turn: Integration of Information Seeking and Retrieval in Context. Berlin: Springer.
Millen, D. R. Feinberg, J. (2006). Using Social Tagging to Improve Social Navigation. In Workshop on the Social Navigation and Community-Based Adaptation Technologies. Conjunction with Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems (AH’06). June 20th, 2006, Dublin, Ireland.
URL: http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~paws/SNC_BAT06/crc/millen.pdf
Millen, D. R., Feinberg, J., Kerr, B. (2005). Social bookmarking in the enterprise. In Queue. 3 (9).
I just upgraded folket.org to Wordpress 2.5 - I think that the newer version look and feel is much better. It wasn’t to hard to install, I only had to contact my IT department twice ?-) But here I am 1½ hours later upgraded.
I don’t think readers will notice the difference ;-)
I just applied for a course in Informetrics. It’s being held in Umeå (Sweden) and are in NorsLIS auspice.
The course features many well-known names in the field of informetrics. My supervisor Jesper Schneider are going to lecure there, as well as Birger larsen. Birger has been helping us a lot in the set up of our pilot study.
Informetrics can be used to measure tags, users and information objects, and I hope I will get some new insights in handling data from folksonomies. Applying informetric (webometric) methods on data from folksonomies are a brand new and very exciting field. My primary focus right now is on my pilot study of del.icio.us, I will later make a post of the findings. I will have a lot of hard data ready for the course in Umeå - data to play with
A friend of mine just published an excellent critical article of web 2.0 services. It debates the web 2.0 companies’ relationship with its users’.
Mørk Petersen, S. (2008). Loser Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation. In: First Monday. 13 (3).
There are some aspects of user driven content that I really find interesting in the article. Søren Mørk Petersen wrote a sentence which is just great:
“It is when the technological infrastructure and design of these sites is combined with capitalism that the architecture begins to oscillate between exploitation and participation.”
The author of the article Søren Mørk Petersen is currently a PhD candidate at the IT
Pecman is an experiment (test) in user tagging of web resources. The experimental setup is that the test person fills out a small form of Internet- and computer experience and of experience with tagging as well as age, sex and email.
Then the test person browse a website, returns to the main-website, and ad tags categorizing the website in question. This proceeds for all the websites included in the test (11 sites). I skipped the last 7 - it got a bit tiresome.
The aim of tagging is explained as “…aim of tag systems is to store and organize content for later retrieval”. This does not correspond with my more broad definition. But thats because I either uses the prefix social or collaborative with -tagging. Thus focusing on the social aspect of tagging and folksonomy-systems.
I would like to know more about the test. More about exactly what are under the microscope in the test ?-) I don’t think that this test show much about tagging as such, the test shows how different users perception of the website in question are in this experimental context. I look forward to see documentation of the experiment. Personally I would have supplied the test persons with an simulated work task, as described in Borlund (2000). This gives test persons a contextual background for conducting a test and applying relevance assessments.
The experiment is conducted by Gerrit Vos and Dirk Bollen from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Centre for Usability Research and are part of the research project Personal Content Management Platform (PeCMan).
All in all and as I said, I look forward to the documentation of the test
References
Borlund, P. (2000). Experimental components for the evaluation of interactive information retrieval systems
In: Journal of Documentation. 56 (1). p. 71 - 90.
DOI: 10.1108/EUM0000000007110
I have a paper in the current issue of Dansk Biblioteksforskning (Danish Library Research), which is a peer reviewed journal of LIS-research in Denmark. The journal is in Danish, but here is an English abstract of my paper:
Folksonomies and collaborative tagging: User driven information architectureThe purpose of this paper is to describe a new phenomenon on the web called folksonomies. A folksonomy is a collection of uncontrolled keywords (tags) that the users assign to information objects. The paper outlines how folksonomies differ from traditional taxonomies by being managed by the users. The individual user’s tag, along with all the users’ tags, constitutes the folksonomy. Folksonomies are emerged as part of web based social technologies which popular are called web 2.0. In this paper del.icio.us, which are one of these technologies, are used to exemplify the use of a folksonomy. Del.icio.us is a web based tool to organize and share internet bookmarks. The paper describes current research in folksonomies and collaborative tagging with focus on the possible utilization of tags in information architecture.
References
Charles Seger (2007). Folksonomier: Brugerstyret indeksering som en del af organisationers informationsarkitektur.
In Dansk Biblioteksforskning. (2). p. 19-32.
URL: http://www2.db.dk/dbf/2007/nr2/seger.pdf
