i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

During last class, while Bob was talking about bad tagging techniques, he wondered why would anybody tag a bookmark on Delicious "tagthis?" A big banner in red started flashing in my mind saying: "Gaming The System" Looking deeper into the issue, "tagthis" seems to be more innocuous than I first imagine. Apparently it was generated by tagth.is, a service that bookmarks links in tweets. This however does not deny the fact that social news networks are being actively gamed by a small but extremely devoted group of people.

NYT story on July 28^th, 2010, (http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/why-dont-more-cameras-offer-gps/) suggests that cameras with GPS functions have been in the market for a year or two. These cameras will provide either built-in or stand-alone add-on devices to capture the latitude and longitude of the location, and ‘geo-tag’ any photo with such information.

 http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/09/20/100920fa_fact_vargas

This article, published in the New Yorker, paints a humble portrait of the co-founder and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg.  In the article, Zuckerberg discusses his desire to create a more open, honest, and transparent world through Facebook.  

Books are important for I-Schoolers. Not just because the School of Information resides on the ground where the Library School once stood but also because libraries were the first to propose and partially solve the organization of information. Libraries are where it all started. The first information organization, the first information retrieval systems and the first document management systems. We discussed some of it in our classes, got our mind imploded with the "Library of Babel". We saw with amazement the old book catalog card Bob showed us in class.

Portion control is about more than calories. It's also about taxes.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100922/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_germany_schnitzel

Along the lines of my previous post about tagging usage in del.icio.us, you might want to take a look at TagWiz. Hyunwoo Park, Satish Polisetti, and Dhawal Mujumbar created this tool to visualize the tags of an individual user in delicious. It provides tag frequency distribution visualization and a metric of how important the long tail effect is.

Several weeks ago, the Oxford University Press conceded that because of the internet, there probably won't be a physical print version of the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/7970391/Oxford-English-Dictionary-will-not-be-printed-again.html

The methodical creation -- and subsequent illustration  -- of taxonomies can provide critical insight and analysis into both organizational and evolutionary qualities of a data set. Rap names lend themselves particularly well to taxonomical examination. Influenced by both strong community bonds (The Wu Tang Clan being the most prominent example) as well as fervent competition among peers, naming conventions in rap have further beneffitted from decades of rapid artistic evolution and cultural influence.

http://chronicle.com/article/Googles-Book-Search-A/48245/

I dug up this almost year old op-ed published in The Chronicle of higher education because it highlights some of the most challenging problems associated with metadata, classification and describing collections.

There is a need to classify the huge amount of data that is available on the internet. The efforts to store it are just useless if we don't count with a good organizing system. What metrics can be valid in this classification process? According to this article in the New York Times, using social media information might be the answer. Recommendations on products or services by people we know or trust seems to be a good metric.