Digital Reference: Improving tagging in del.icio.us

Monday, July 07, 2008

Improving tagging in del.icio.us

When it comes to bookmarking things on the web, I am a moderate to heavy user of del.icio.us. I've got three accounts, each of which is for different purposes:

sharing links with my wife
indexing posts on this blog
bookmarking things that I need/want for professional purposes

The third one, which I set up in 2004, is where most of the action is. I've got nearly 900 items in that third account, which averages out to nearly five posted items a week. I'll be the first to admit that my tagging system, while personally meaningful and usable, is probably inconsistent and shows that I made a wise decision in not becoming a cataloger.

I would like some help in thinking up what tags to add to any site I want to bookmark. I have a wishlist of things that del.icio.us could do to improve the tagging experience. Basically, I'd like more suggestions of tags. Those suggestions could come from many different sources.

First, delicious would automatically extract meaning from the page you want to bookmark. I'm thinking here of what a semantic web tool like Calais can do (I wrote earlier in the year about an experiment I did with Calais analyzing one of my blog posts). The tags suggested by the extraction process would come from whatever set of sources and taxonomies you prefer, such as Library of Congress Subject Headings, MeSH, Steve (not me but the social tagging of art objects project), LibraryThing tags (including just my tags), tags from other social bookmarking services, etc.

Next, you would also see tags from your friends on del.icio.us. It's likely that most of the people I would friend in del.icio.us would be other people working in libraries and archives; they would probably prefer the same terminology I do and offer up useful suggestions to me. I would like it if I could get del.icio.us to search my FriendFeed account to see which friends that I have there also have del.icio.us accounts and automatically add them to my delicious network.

Finally, I would continue to see (as I do now) a set of tags recommended by others on delicious who have bookmarked the same site I want to add. Del.icio.us would give me options in my account settings that would let me decide how I want to prioritize the list of recommended tags (what sources of tag suggestions would come first; how would they be grouped, if at all, etc.)

In short, when I am ready to bookmark a page in del.icio.us, I want the service to offer me the wisdom of the crowds (and, in the case of automatic extraction, the wisdom of machines). I don't want, though, just the crowds who are bookmarking in del.icio.us but also those who are cataloging, classifying, and tagging in lots of other places.

6 Comments:

At 9:58 PM , T Tague said...: Stephen:

Tom Tague from Calais here.

This is functionality we've considered adding to our Gnosis Firefox plugin (http://opencalais.com/node/95) - basically would allow you to create delicious tags from the entities (people, places, etc) on a page automatically. Our only concern is noise level - it could generate a lot of tags over time.

We've just implemented relevance scoring by entity - perhaps we could allow users to set a relevance cutoff for autotagging?

Do you (and others) think this would be a useful tool?
At 9:25 AM , caleb said...: ok, so del.icio.us/yahoo! may not jump at your suggestions, but some of this work may have been done already - see http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2005/02/absolutely-delicious-complete-tools-collection/ and especially the more recent-ish comments.

your best bet might be to hack your firefox del.icio.us plugin with a greasemonkey script. this sounds like it might not be that hard!
At 2:38 PM , Stephen Francoeur said...: Tom: Since I've switched over to FF3, I won't be able to try out the Gnosis plugin (although it does look like it will offer some of what I'm after). Will it be compatible with FF3 soon? I suppose I'm kind of a nut, as I'm happier with a lot of noise when it comes to tag suggestions (I'll look at them and use them). It would be great if those tag suggestions could also include ones from taxonomies that you specify.

Caleb: Not only am I a bit of nut, I'm a lazy nut. I don't think I'm up to tackling creating my own greasemonkey script (not yet, at least). The blog post from Quick Online Tips is good and full of suggestions; I'll comb it for things that may work for me, but I've got rather grand expectations for what I want (inspiration from Daniel Burnham: ""Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will not themselves be realized.")
At 3:12 PM , Stephen Francoeur said...: Tom: My mistake about Gnosis not being compatible with FF3. The version on the Mozilla site is for FF2, but the version on the main page about Gnosis on the Calais site does work with FF3.

I just did an analysis of this blog post and found the Gnosis plugin missed a few things. As you can see from the screenshot of the Gnosis marked up web page and from the screenshot of the Gnosis sidebar view, some key content was not found (such as Calais, del.icio.us, FriendFeed, and LibraryThing as companies) and came up with some odd things as "facilities" (such as "Camp NYC" which Gnosis found in the link label for "Library Camp NYC.") I think the potential of this plugin is there to do the analysis, and I don't doubt that the technology will get better. It would be cool if there was a way to export the "entities" data. I'll keep fooling around with the plugin (especiallly the way you can customize what sources it uses for actions...maybe I'll see what it does if directed to look up a highlighted term in a thesaurus or taxonomy).
At 3:29 PM , Stephen Francoeur said...: I seem to be writing more in the comments than in the original post, so intrigued am I by the Gnosis plugin. When I wrote my last comment, I guess I misunderstood what the functionality was supposed to be with the "Automatic Site Processing." What I foolishly thought was that you could add a URL for site that you wanted to be a target for the searches that Gnosis can run for you on any highlighted term. A few minutes of clearer-headed thinking and I realized that the "Automatic Site Processing" option in Gnosis is just a way to tell Gnosis what web sites to automatically analyze as they load on your screen. I'd love to see the Gnosis plugin give you options for what targets it would use for searching (you'd see a list of the entity types and checkboxes for the resources you'd like to be search targets for each type). Furthermore, I'd like to see a way to add your own targets so you can have Gnosis run searches in your favorite reference sites (such as search IMDB.com for Movies, MusicBrainz for Music, PubMed for Medical Condition, etc.)
At 10:54 AM , caleb said...: actually, I knew you were going to say that :)

the interesting thing is that I completely ignore tag recommendations.

i treat del.icio.us as a junk drawer. i throw anything in that i might want to look at again someday later. i think of words i would probably associate with it in a week, a month, a year.

i take it you're after some other kind of organizational principle, and the fact that del.icio.us can accomodate us both and everyone else is part of what makes it so cool.