Category: eCitizens

Everyone is talking and tagging about Folksonomy these days. All my tagging experiments show that I too have jumped the bandwagon.

So, we have taxonomies and controlled vocabularies, lots of them (and soon even more of them), but we also have folks, who can’t be bothered to use them, but actually do want some order in the chaos, and then we get folksonomies.

A folksonomy represents simultaneously some of the best and worst in the organization of information. Its uncontrolled nature is fundamentally chaotic, suffers from problems of imprecision and ambiguity that well developed controlled vocabularies and name authorities effectively ameliorate. Adam Mathes (2004) Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata

I am close to getting to a state where I am satisfied, for now, with my GotzeTagged, in which I make use of folksonomies (fetches del.icio.us content etc.). As I worked on GotzeTagged, and tried to describe it as something more exciting than a link index, it just cried out being called a personomy. I have no idea where that came from, but I like it 🙂
Google shows that someone has registred the domain name, but also that nobody has written about personomy. Until now.

A personomy is “my folksonomy”: Here’s my del.icio.us personomy (‘all tags’). I guess there can be big and small personomies. I also guess that the Zeitgeist has a huge influence not only on the folksonomies, but also on our personomies.

Why personomy?
So when
Tim Bray asks:

What am I doing categories for? What is anybody doing categories for? What is everybody doing categories for?

The answer is: It’s all about our personomies.

Liz Lawley notes that Clay argues that detractors from wikipedia and folksonomy are ignoring the compelling economic argument in favor of their widespread use and adoption, and concludes:

Perhaps. But I’m arguing that it’s just as problematic to ignore the compelling social, cultural, and academic arguments against lowest-common-denominator classification. I don’t want to toss out folksonomies. But I also don’t want to toss out controlled vocabularies, or expert assignment of categories. I just don’t believe that all expertise can be replicated through repeated and amplified non-expert input.

I agree.

Louis Rosenfeld describes folksonomies as metadata ecologies, and rightly advises not to take an either/or perspective on folksonomies and taxonomies (more controlled metadata vocabularies):

Please don’t; they are simply two of the many useful approaches to helping users find information.

I now sit here and wonder how much the concept of personomy can be seen as a useful approach to helping users find what they are after.

The architecture astronauts tend to be very much “either/or” when relating to folksonomy-taxonomy.

Personomies and personas
We have long known that architects can get a kick out of thinking in terms of Personas and Use Cases. Architects talk about persona-influenced design perspectives, the customer decision-making process, and prescriptive user engineering. Important stuff. But is it enough? Well, enough for what?

Use cases are like chocolate: They’re delicious, but probably not enough to live of.

Personomy is about using a empathetic focus on personas.

Personomy is like a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re going to get.
–Forrest Gotze

Step 1: I listened to IT Conversations with Owen Davis of Identity Commons.

Step 2: I read this NewsForge article.

Step 3: I acquired my i-name: =gotze.

Steve and I went to Blogforum both Friday and Saturday (in parts). It was great to meet local bloggers, and talk about all aspects of blogging.

“How can we make money on this?” was a recurring question – there were a lot of entrepreneurs present. But also social, cultural and political aspects of blogging were discussed, and some good ideas came up about how blogs can “save the world”, even here in Denmark. I hope others will blog about the ideas, because I missed too much of the debates to make a comprehensive summary.

Steve showed a few blogs from the US presidential campaign. We showed Nyrup’s blog.

On the US elections, I just found a fun one: Howard Dean won the Denmark award in GoogleRace. I suppose GoogleRace is a pretty simple implementation of the Google api, but it’s a neat solution (not very useful, but neat).

I’ve bought my flight tickets for my trip to the US today. That proved more difficult than I’d expected. It’s not the lack of travel booking sites out there, nor the fact that I needed a multi-legged flight (which did rule out many booking sites however). No, it because I learned that all “international” sites (expedia, orbitz, etc) requests you to be a US resident to book a flight in the US. International my a**. Most didn’t mention that even in the small print, and had me working their bloddy forms for hours, only to learn that DK is not a state in their world.

So, I ended up buying the tickets through a traditional travel agent. Interestingly, I was able to get a cheaper ticket than what I ever found on the net.

Anyway, these are the dates I’ll be in the US:
28 July – 2 August: Salt Lake City, Utah
2 August – 10 August: Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington and around.

If anyone are around there and then and wants to meet up, drop me a mail!

It’s time for the next International Blog Meetup Day. In Copenhagen, the meetup will take place at Prop’s Coffee Shop, Bl�gardsgade 5, on Wednesday, July 16 at 19.00. I plan to go.

I’ll be speaking in a workshop on the national conference The Digital Dialogue, Den Digitale Dialog about self-service and communication between universities and students, to be held here in Copenhagen on 20-21 January 2003.

My session comes after first an hour with my boss Mikkel Hemmingsen and then a political speech by our minister, Helge Sander, so I guess I have to cut through all the “managment speak” and go straight to the issue (which will be architecture). Good chance to take some time out to prepare a new presentation (even though I could imagine I end up preparing more than just my own presentation …).

Any thoughts about the special challenges universities are facing when architecting their services to students (and staff)?

Yesterday, I created a bookmarklet which is now featured (as of of many implementations) on Jon Udell’s LibraryLookup (Innovative Interfaces libraries). Thanks Jon.

The bookmarklet is rather special. If you are on any webpage about a book, and the URL has the ISBN number somewhere in it, clicking on the bookmarklet will bring up a window with a message about whether the book is available in a public library.

In Udell’s and others implementations, the bookmarklet interacts with one library’s database. In the Danish case, it is a bit more advanced. Because we have bibliotek.dk which is not a library, but a database of holdings in all danish libraries, the bookmarklet searches all public libraries at once. Via bibliotek.dk, you can send an order to your local library (regardless of which library owns the material) and after a few days pick up the material from your own library.

I have no affiliation to bibliotek.dk, and just went to their site and played around with the URLs (badly designed? or is there an idea?). Danish Bibliographic Centre runs the site. library.dk is an English language interface to the database.

I searched for some info about the technology behind bibliotek.dk. It seems they use some old Z39.50 technology, but are adding XML.

A few hours ago, a few kilometers from my home, the Copenhagen European Council’s Presidency Conclusions were announced by the Danish Prime Minister, and marks the conclusion of the accession negotiations with Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, the Slovak Republic and Slovenia. These will be new members of EU from 1 May 2004, if they want to (there has to be referendums in all countries).

The top meeting has brought thousands of politicians, journalists and and not least activists to Copenhagen. In the largest police action Denmark has seen, the police has practically occupied Copenhagen. The Bella Center area, where the meetings were held, has been a barricaded fortress these days, as so has the Parliament. And lots of areas in Copenhagen were closed down.

There have been a number of peaceful demonstrations, but nothing like the situation we saw last you in Sweden, with the riots in Gothenburg around the top meeting. I happened to be in Gothenburg at that time, and it was not a pretty sight.

The Danish EU Presidency’s official website, eu2002.dk, is running fine, it seems. One site that is not running is disobidience.dk, one of the activist sites. It has been DoS-attacked, after it itself called for people to attack the EU-site, under the slogan “Electronic civil disobedience… It rocks!”. The police went after the ISP that hosted disobidience.dk.