The Two Mules, originally uploaded by Tom Coates.
A fable for the Nations
Co-operation is better than Conflict
The Two Mules, originally uploaded by Tom Coates.
A fable for the Nations
Co-operation is better than Conflict
Leigh asks So any signs that “tag spam” has started yet? (found because he uses “trust metrics” a keyword to which I’m subscribed in a number of service). Here I ask the same question. It seems very unlikely that web spammers (they called themselves “search engine optimizer”) cannot see in seconds the value of getting the wanted URL (of the to-be-busted book, movie, …) or photo (of to-be-busted movie, product, …) under my eyes. Afterwards, we are in the attention economy, aren’t we? Getting attention of some humans (or aggregators and, as a consequence, of many humans) on your item is the first step towards you getting reputation (and possibly money). [by the way, the same is true for this blog post].
However, if you look it from a biodiversity point of view, spam is good because forces you to evolve, to differentiate, to invent new solutions.
So, any signs of “tag spam”? If you find something, write it on wikipedia pages Spam or Spamdexing (there is nothing at the moment about this) or ask Britannica to insert it in the next version (hope you get the difference…).
But first, how to define “tag spam”? A bot is always a spammer? If you genuinely think that microsoft.com could be tagged as crap, then this is not spam? But if you tag something just in order to capture attention of other people, then this is spam? If I tag on del.icio.us this post as “folksonomy“, is this spam? If I tag my papers on CiteULike as “Cool” is this tag spam?
Rebecca pointed out that someone tagged on flickr an antisemite protest sign as “MLK” (Martin Luther King). Is this tag spam? She says “community standards” do not, indeed, can not defend against abuse of the system–only design can do that. Off the top of my head, there are several simple things Technorati could do to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future:
And in fact, Rebecca is already starting to provide anti-spam techniques:
* Technorati could design their system not to publish any photo Flickr users have tagged “Might be offensive”.
* Technorati could create their own tagging system, and not publish any photo Technorati users tagged “Might be offensive”.
* Technorati could provide an email address so that users could alert staff if a photo was offensive or inappropriate, and then the staff could go in and tag the inappropriate photo so that it would not appear on Technorati’s site–or hand-select an appropriate one.
And in fact David Weinberger’s (implicitly) also suggesting to use a trust metric when he says
“Tags work because they’re so simple and because they are so connected to the human semantic context, but having billions of tags won’t work because they’re so simple and connected to the human semantic context. Will we be able to triangulate tags with other data – especially social data – so that we can get more out of them than we put in? It doesn’t seem impossible to me – simply knowing who created a tag lets you get more out of the tag than the person put in – but it’s not up to me to invent the stuff.”
Let me make a strong point here: “Tag Spam does not exist. What does exist are different ways of viewing stuff in the world (and I hope there will always be!). What does exist are also incentives to get attention of other people”. How can we take the most out of decentralized tagging? I think that using trust metrics we can choose to consider only tags provided by sources we deem trustworthy and exclude all the rest. There is the risk of DailyMe here: that is you will see only world classifications of people you already agree with and you will never ever get exposed to different way of thinking. I was speculating about it some time ago and leave this topic for next time.
Ok, I started with “trust metrics” and, having closed the circle, here I stop.
UPDATE: you can never stop. While I was writing 2 posts on Corante appeared that are very relevant.
In “issues of culture in ethnoclassification/folksonomy” danah argues that tagging is culture dependent. The great example about the book “Women, Fire and Dangerous Things” tells us that if someone (of a the culture described in the book) tags a picture of a woman under “danger”, this is not at all tag spam but simply a different point of view on world, a different culture (not a better or worst one).
And in Folksonomy is better for cultural values Clay replies that the same problems applies to ontologies but exacerbated and that “The aggregate good of tags is not that they create consensus or accuracy; they observably don�t, and this is very observability is much of their value.” He also reports that “But the relativity can also be interesting when crossed-tabbed with the identity of the tagger; I don�t want �toread� or �funny� generally, but I do want Liz�s �toread� tags, and Matt Webb�s �funny� links.” In my Jargon, he is here expressing a trust statement (I trust as 1/1 Liz in the context of “toberead” tag). What I propose is to use this information to automatically discover the identities trusted by Liz in the context of “toberead” context and automatically suggest them to Clay. The balance between “i keep a small and direct and controllable social network of people i really know” or” i use also automated tools that can infer, based on the global social network, how much i could trust unknown users” should be an user option in my opinion. The first is more controllable, the second is more prone to serendipity, exposure to something new and new persons but also less controllable and under risk of social attacks.
Since I’m here, there are other interesting posts I found later on navigating some of the links. They are here below:
Cheap Eats at the Semantic Web Caf�
Folksonomy Notes: Considering the Downsides, Behavioral Trends, and Adaptation
The Politically Correct Police (PCP) are making lots of noise about how “This isn’t right and SOMETHING SHOULD BE DONE”.
Technorati Tags Set for Abuse who is tagged as “Nude Celebrities” just to prouve the concept
Shapes of knowledge, word for poodles
Making use of tags and tagsonomies
Controlled Vocabularies and Folksonomies: Why Change is Good.
Social consequences of social tagging
and i guess you will find all of them on del.icio.us’s “folksonomy” tag
Trentino (local newspaper of Trento) is reporting that “Microsoft will open its first Italian Microsoft Reseach Center in Trento”. None of my colleagues knew about this before. I think this news (if confirmed) will affect in many ways all the research institutes in Trento area (they are many) and nobody seems to know how. [ehm, I think I should remove all those anti- microsoft I was enjoying writing lately ;-) ]
(via TeledyN) An alliance announced today between MSN Music and Smithsonian Folkways Recordings will make tens of thousand of historic songs from legendary performers of folk, blues, jazz and world music available online for the first time, allowing music fans to discover a diverse world of music and sound. But from the archive I can get nothing, since the System Requirements are screamful and I don’t use the crappiest operating system ever. This is an example of e-exclusion: since I choose not to use that operating system, I am cut out of this experience. File formats (and songs formats obviously) MUST be open so that everyone can be free to write a program able to read them! Just try to imagine if Microsoft was more smart and understood earlier what the web could have been. We would have now: closed protocols (no TCP/IP, no HTTP, but M$TP!), no open formats for web pages (no HTML but M$ML). Of course you would not be able to use whatever program to communicate over the internet or to create a page but you would have been forced to pay for highly-unuseful and dangerous and closed-source M$ software! I’m so depressed that most people just don’t see it: the future Microsoft wants for us is a future of darkness. Following you can find the System Requirements for listening to “historic songs from legendary performers of folk, blues, jazz and world music”:
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A lot of discussion about why tags are so useful (folksonomies is the current buzzword) on Many2Many. As I noted in a previous post, at the moment there are services that allows you to tag: URLs (del.icio.us), photos (flickr), your emails (gmail), posts on metafilter (metafilter), posts on your blog (technorati, using <a ref="tag">
), scientific papers (citeulike), todo items (43things) and books (bookswelike, which I just discovered).
But what we would really really really enjoy is MUSIC TAGGING!
So, is there a site where it is possible to apply free tags to songs? And to collections of songs? I’m not aware of such a site. I mean totally free tags (such as PsyChill or MaleNeuvoFolk) to express your personal categorization of a set of songs and not ID3 tags.
I think WebJay should be our friend here. Let me first say that I’m in total love with webjay, a site that helps you listen to and publish web playlists, i.e. collections of mp3s (and other formats) available on the web. Here are my webjay playlists.
So, coming back to the subject of the post, I definitely think we would enjoy a free-tagging music site and I think WebJay is the best candidate and Lucas Gonze (the developer of webjay) totally rocks. Anyway, Seb (@WJ) was arguing on webjay forum some time ago that “Webjay Needs Tags” and the entire discussion (7 posts) is really interesting. Lucas is not that convinced since he argues that playlists and tags are very different metaphors and very different organizing principles and also that “WJ is radically constrained by the lack of money”.
I think tags could be applied both to playlists (I tag this playlist as “mellow”) and single songs (I tag this song as “PsyChill”). Both ways seems appealing to me about what they can produce, for example: “let me see all the playlists tagged as ‘mellowblues’ or “i’ve 30 free minutes, play me a collection of ‘coldrelax’ songs”). The good of tags is that they are not imposed from the top (i agree with riddle (@wj) when he says “I’m glad that you didn’t impose a preconceived notion of genre on Webjay”) but they emerge from the bottom. Lastly, hideout (@WJ) proposes to use del.icio.us system to tag playlists since every playlist has a permanent URL. This can be a low-impact-on-webjay solution and very small-pieces-loosely-connected one and i definitely think it can make sense. Maybe it would be better if Lucas integrates the remote tagging made on del.icio.us on WebJay interface in order to make it in some way visible and promote its usage.
What do you think? Want to share your point of view? You can either do it on WebJay Forum or with a comment here. Music free tagging is the next step! [ehm, I think I’m not good in inventing new words … so i leave to you the option to invent the new cool buzzword for music-free-tagging].
Over at Terranova, nathan is thinking about trust in games. One of the reasoning lines goes along “more powerful characters can be less trusting of the world around them than the weaker”. Interesting, it seems that the weak is obliged to risk by trusting other unknown users while the strong can rely on herself, at least in part.
Anyway, I think virtual worlds are definetely a good playground for studying how social relationships evolve over time. Do you know of any MMORPG that is making available (possibly anonimized) data about characters’ interactions? Or do you know of a powerful and open-source framework for quickly creating an appealing online environment in which it would be possible to study those dynamics?
Interesting NYTimes’s article (if you don’t want to register, use BugMeNot where you can find shared login and password pairs). Mikhail Gronas discovers that “reviewers gave more five-star reviews than two-star reviews, creating an upward sloping curve”. (…) “But the most telling variable is the one star rating. Professor Gronas found that books high on what he called the “controversiality index” are given almost as many one-star as five-star ratings, creating a horseshoe-shaped curve. As it turns out, these books also tend to have high sales.”
I’ve found these patterns analyzing Epinions.com ratings and trust statements (chech the graphs’ on the paper (pdf)) but actually I don’t think they are that surprising: they seem pretty obvious and I just reported them passing by.
What is really depressing is that Dartmouth is now in the process of patenting software that will be used to determine the “controversiality index”.
I’m happy that in Europe we are still fighting against a so-stupid-policy of being able to patent everything, no matter how trivial it is. In this case the controversiality level of a book is something like “if a book received as much 5 ratings as 1 and if the 5 and 1 ratings together are the vast majority of ratings and if the number of received ratings is over a threshold (probably depending on release time), then the book is controversial” (putting it in formula that produces a controversiality value would require 10 minutes at most).
By the way, I’m currently working on the concept of controversiality of users and hopefully a paper is on the way. Controversial users are users who are trusted by many and distrusted by many. (Bush is a good example, but this can happen to highly visible persons in general). The idea is that Local Trust Metrics make sense expecially for highly controversial users (for example, users who are trusted by more than 200 users and DIStrusted by more than 200 users in the community). For those users, it does not make sense to predict a trust value of 0.5 saying that you should trust this user as 0.5 but, instead, to predict you should trust this controversial user as 1 if, for example, all your friends trust her and 0 if all your friends distrust her.
“To put this metaphorically, we are not driving a car, with gas, brakes, reverse and a lot of choice as to route. We are steering a kayak, pushed rapidily and monotonically down a route determined by the enviroment. We have a (very small) degree of control over our course in this particular stretch of river, and that control does not extend to being able to reverse, stop, or even significantly alter the direction w’re moving in.”
I love how Clay Shirky writes! Read the entire post on Many2Many about the fact “mass amateurization of cataloging” is going to happen anyway.
School and Workshop on Structure and Function of Complex Networks. 16 – 28 May 2005 at Abdus Salam ICTP – Trieste – Italy.
Even if the dealine for the application is already passed, it seems there are still some places. Check the poster (pdf): the invited speakers are just great! Note that “Although the main purpose of the Centre is to help research workers from developing countries, a limited number of students and post-doctoral scientists from developed countries are also welcome to attend.” and “There is no registration fee to be paid” (via an email on SOCNET mailinglist of INSNA).
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Too funny! Microsoft’s AntiSpyware Tool removes Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser judging it as Spyware. Wouldn’t it be better if it would remove the entire Windows? Maybe your occasion for changing it with Gnu/Linux? (via asa). [The linked story is satire: it is not true]