OCLC Pilots Socially Constructed Metadata

OCLC has caught the socially constructed metadata fever. A release on the OCLC site titled "User-contributed content pilot" discusses a pilot program to allow Open WorldCat users to add publicly visible metadata, in the form of reviews and descriptive details, to existing records.

This looks the latest step in the wave of exploration of methods and models for putting socially constructed metadata into practice that's playing out in public. (Is this necessarily done in public? I'm curious to hear thoughts on how this might be done with closed or cloaked communities, like IBM's intranet).

Broadly, it looks like a wide variety of entities are following the standard new product or service development cycle with regards to socially constructed metadata. A simplified version of this cycle is:

1. Conceptualization, technology development
2. Product development
3. Introduction to market
4. Market Acceptance and growth
5. Ongoing Market as conventional product

A quick review of known social bookmarking / tagging ventures distributed over a number of organizations supports the idea that each experiment is at one of these stages.

Some visualizations of development and prototype cycles are available here, and here.

Where's it headed? I think we'll see at least forms forms or applications of socially constructed metadata stabilize and become publicly recognized and accepted in the near future, with more on the way that will surprise everyone. Those four are:

1. Fee for services models, paying for access to premium quality pools of collectively managed information under professional (paid) editorial custody. OCLC could adopt this model.

2. Non-commercial community driven pools of social knowledge. This might be delicio.us.

3. Deployment as an enabler or attribute of other product / service models. Flickr is an example of this perhaps.

4. Publicly free but commercialized information mining operations, deriving salable value from formalizing the semantic relationships between people, groups, and information objects. TagCloud.com might fall into this group, or maybe Cloudalicious.

5. Something very innovative I will wish I'd thought of when it's released.

Excerpts from the OCLC release:

"As of October 9, 2005, Open WorldCat users are able to add their own content to authoritative WorldCat information about library-held titles. Available under the Details and Reviews tabs, this functionality permits those who have located library items through Open WorldCat to return to the interface and add evaluative content."

"User-contributed content will help extend the OCLC cataloging cooperative to include non-cataloging library professionals and - more importantly - patrons. Their shared participation in WorldCat content creation and management could foster a larger sense of library-centered community and generate more interest in library resources."

local tags: customer_relationships, innovation, lifecycle, metadata, oclc, product_design, social_systems, tagging

The Tag Wars: Clay Shirky and Technological Utopianism

Looks like Dave Sifry at Technorati has drunk the Clay Shirky Koolaid on tagging and social bookmarking. Here's something from Dave's posting State of the Blogosphere, August 2005, Part 3: Tags, that shows he's clearly joined the academy of received ideas.

"Unlike rigid taxonomy schemes that many people dislike using, the ease of tagging for personal organization with social incentives leads to a rich and discoverable system, often called a folksonomy. Intelligence is provided by real people from the bottom-up to aid social discovery. And with the right tag search and navigation, folksonomy may outperform more structured approches to classification, as Clay Shirky points out..."

I'm disappointed to see this. The quality level of Shirky's thinking and writing related to tagging is generally low; too often he's so completely off the mark with much of what he's said about tagging, social bookmarking, and categorization in general that his main contribution is in lending a certain amount of attention by virtue of name recognition to a subject that used to be arcane.

There's little need to rehash the many, many individual weaknesses in Shirky's writings, just one example of which is his establishment of a false dichotomy separating structured categorization systems and social tagging practices. Broadly, his approach and rhetoric show strong influence from anarchism, and utopian social theory.

From Shirky:
"There is no fixed set of categories or officially approved choices. You can use words, acronyms, numbers, whatever makes sense to you, without regard for anyone else's needs, interests, or requirements."

Further, "...with tagging, anyone is free to use the words he or she thinks are appropriate, without having to agree with anyone else about how something "should" be tagged."

Building back on the criticique of computerization, it's clear that Shirky uses rhetorical strategies and positions from both technological utopianism and anti-utopianism.

Here's Professor Rob Kling on technological utopianism:
"Utopian images are common in many books and articles about computerization in society
written by technologists and journalists. I am particularly interested in what can be learned,
and how we can be misled, by a particular brand of utopian thought -- technological
utopianism. This line of analysis places the use of some specific technology, such as
computers, nuclear energy, or low-energy low-impact technologies, as key enabling
elements of a utopian vision. Sometimes people will casually refer to exotic technologies --
like pocket computers which understand spoken language -- as "utopian gadgets."
Technological utopianism does not refer to these technologies with amazing capabilities. It
refers to analyses in which the use of specific technologies plays a key role in shaping a
benign social vision. In contrast, technological anti- utopianism examines how certain broad
families of technology are key enablers of a harsher and more destructive social order."

That Shirky would take speak from this standpoint is not a surprise; he's identified as a "Decentralization Writer/Consultant" in the description of his session "Ontology is Overrated: Links, Tags, and Post-hoc Metadata" at etech, and it's clear that he's both technologist and a journalist, as Kilng identifies.

Regardless of Shirky's bias, there is a bigger picture worth examining. Tagging or social bookmarking is one potential way for the community of social metadata system users to confront problems of individual and group information overload, via a collective and nominally unhierarchical approach to the emergent problem of information management across common resources (URIs).

local tags: futurism, hierarchy, library_science, metadata, shirky, social_informatics, social_systems, tagging, utopianism

Survey on Social Bookmarking Tools

The April issue of D-Lib Magazine includes a two-part Survey of social bookmarking tools.

Social bookmarking is on the collective brain - at least for the moment -and most of those writing about it choose to take one or more positions for, against, or orthogonal to its various aspects. Here's the position of the D-Lib survey authors:

"Despite all the current hype about tags - in the blogging world, especially - for the authors of this paper, tags are just one kind of metadata and are not a replacement for formal classification systems such as Dublin Core, MODS, etc. [n15]. Rather, they are a supplemental means to organize information and order search results."

This is -- no surprise from "a solely electronic publication with a primary focus on digital library research and development, including but not limited to new technologies, applications, and contextual social and economic issues" -- the librarians' view, succinctly echoed by Peter Morville in his presentation during the panel 'Sorting Out Social Classification' at this year's Information Architecture summit.

The D-Lib authors' assessment dovetails nicely with Peter's views on The Speed of Information Architecture from 2001, and it shows how library science professionals may decide to place social bookmarking in relation to the larger context of meta-data lifecycles; a realm they've known and inhabited for far longer than most people have used Flickr to tag their photos.

I found some of the authors' conclusions more surprising. They say, "In many ways these new tools resemble blogs stripped down to the bare essentials." I'm not sure what this means; stripped-down is the sort of term that usually connotes a minimalist refactoring or adaptation that is designed to emphasize the fundamental aspects of some original thing under interpretation, but I don't think they want readers to take away the notion that social bookmarking is an interpretation of blogging.

Moving on, they say, "Here the essential unit of information is a link, not a story, but a link decorated with a title, a description, tags and perhaps even personal recommendation points." which leaves me wondering why it's useful to compare Furl to blogging?

A cultural studies professor of mine used to say of career academics, "We decide what things mean for a living". I suspect this is what the D-Lib authors were working toward with their blogging comparison. Since the label space for this thing itself is a bit crowded (contenders being ethnoclassification, folksonomy, social classification), it makes better sense to elevate the arena of your own territorial claim to a higher level that is less cluttered with other claimants, and decide how it relates to something well-known and more established.

They close with, "It is still uncertain whether tagging will take off in the way that blogging has. And even if it does, nobody yet knows exactly what it will achieve or where it will go - but the road ahead beckons."

This is somewhat uninspiring, but I assume it satisfies the XML schema requirement that every well-structured review or essay end with a conclusion that opens the door to future publications.

Don't mistake my pique at the squishiness of their conclusions for dis-satisfaction with the body of the survey; overall, the piece is well-researched and offers good context and perspective on the antecedents of and concepts behind their subject. Their invocation of Tim O'Reilly's 'architectures of participation' is just one example of the value of this survey as an entry point into related phenomena.

Another good point the D-Lib authors make is the way that the inherent locality, or context-specificity, of collections of social bookmarks allows them to provide higher-quality pointers to resources relevant for specialized purposes than the major search engines, which by default index globally, or without an editorial perspective.

Likely most useful for the survey reader is their set of references, which taps into the meme flow for social bookmarking by citing a range of source conversations, editorials, and postings from all sides of the phenomenon.

local tags: blogging, classification, dlib, folksonomy, metadata, socialbookmarking, tagging, tools