I changed the look of my blog, using the alexking.org: Software >Kubrick style by Hadley Wickham, adding my own image.

My first screencast is an explanation of Camtasia screencasting software. (Quicktime movie, 11M)

The Belkin digital camera link doesn't support iPod mini. Is there a way to store your pictures on your iPod mini while travelling?

Many-to-Many: Folksonomy is better for cultural values: A response to danah: "The entire alt. hierarchy in usenet came into being because there was a proposal to create rec.drugs, and there was concern that usenet, running in part over an NSF-funded network, would be shut down. The alt.* hierarchy was a compromise, to allow some face saving in suggesting that the *.drugs group was not 'official'. And of course, alt. (an early folksonomy, albeit highly compromised by usenet's hierarchical design) ballooned to many times the size of the 'official' usenet.)"

alex wright: "In The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco creates the cautionary figure of Salvatore, a fallen monk who "spoke all languages and no languages."

Many-to-Many: issues of culture in ethnoclassification/folksonomy. Good, some more attention for culture and classification. Includes a good link to Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society by Raymond Williams. Looks like an interesting book!

frassle is a bit like del.icio.us, but lets you add hierarchy.

Woohoo! My first functional internet archive-hosted video!

Raymond and me talking about political videoblogging. (Quicktime, 4.7 M)

Burningbird � Cheap Eats at the Semantic Web Caf�. Shelley on tags and folksonomies. Mmmm. I'm gonna be brief here: Shelley's point seems to be: "tags won't scale because they're too easy and don't contain enough semantic information" (flat namespace and all).

I don't think that's right. There is a LOT we can do to add semantics to tags: who created them, what namespace they come from (yes, most tags DO come from a namespace), algorythmical parsing of all kinds (related, ...), mapping to controlled vocabs (use Wordnet to find synonyms or something). Look at the amount of innovation that has been done with search algorythms. The same can happen with tags.

That said, I do believe tags are strongest when tagging content that doesn't contain text by and of itself (url's, images, movies).

trying ecto

so I upgraded to Wordpress 1.2.2 (from 1.2) and I'm trying Ecto again now... the tension! the excitement! The women!

ecto blog

I am trying ecto for Windows XP with my Wordpress 1.2 blog. It shows the categories of my blog in the ecto interface, so there is some communication with the Wordpress going on, but when I try to post a new post, I get:

"Server error: Response from server does not contain valid xml. "

Any tips? I tried searching for help but no luck.

The Maori versus Dewey

My series of posts on international information architecture:

1. Translating taxonomies and categories
2. Translating categories, translating terms
3. Translating the Dewey Decimal Classification system
4. Designing the relationship between content and locales
5. Emergent i18n effects in folksonomies
6. The Maori versus Dewey, and why limiting access can be culturally appropriate. (This post.)

While doing research on cultural differences in information needs, I came across the fascinating paper "Cross-cultural usability of the library metaphor" (Elke Duncker, 2002). It talks about how people from the Maori tribes have problems with libraries. There is a lot of good stuff in the paper, but the two things I want to talk about today are:

• How Dewey subjects headings really don't work for the Maori. (Really)
• How sometimes, limiting access can be culturally appropriate.

Let's get going. Have you seen the movie Whalerider? Those are the Maori, a Polynesian culture with an oral tradition. Libraries are common to all written cultures, but oral cultures have other ways to keep their stories: songs, story gatekeepers and such. The paper describes the Maori way:

Traditionally Maori knowledge has been transferred orally. For centuries, Maori knowledge and skills have been handed down from one selected person to the next. While no individual knew everything, all knowledge was available within the tribe or sub-tribe at any given time. The keeper of the knowledge was seen as a living repository of this knowledge. He or she was supposed to ‘look after the knowledge’ which meant to memorize it in great detail, to use it for the best of the tribe and to pass it on to the next person selected to look after it. Genealogies were the core of traditional Maori knowledge. Even today, Maori trace their ancestors back to a particular passenger of one of the canoes with which they came. This knowledge is tapu and not for public display.

The Maori that use libraries today are a bi-cultural elite: they grew up in Maori culture, but also had access to mainstream culture. Still, they have a lot of problems finding things in the libraries. One of the main problems is the Dewey classification system used to organize things. Melvin Dewey was a white westerner, and his classification system is well known for showing western biases. For example, here is the "Religion" subsection: 210 Natural theology 220 Bible 230 Christian Theology 240 Christian moral & devotional theology 250 Christian orders & local churches 260 Christian social theology 270 Christian church history 280 Christian denominations & sects 290 Other and comparative religions You can see how this taxonomy is somewhat western-centered, right? Just a little bit? Still, the Dewey system has survived, and is used in libraries throughout the world. Now, apart from it's obvious flaws, there are deeper, cultural problems with Dewey, or any classification system for that matter. It's roots are so ingrained in us that it's hard to see how someone might see the world in a fundamentally different way. The Maori worldview is very much centered around the tribal world, and the backbone of the Maori tribal world is genealogy (ancestry). If a Maori wants to find information about their culture, a really important way for them to search is by genealogy, all the way back to that original canoe. Unfortunately, Maori genealogy isn't represented in Dewey's classification system. From the paper:

Maori knowledge, when divided into subject areas based upon Anglo-American categories, becomes scattered across the library in a seemingly random way. Texts that belong together undergo an artificial division and end up in different places. Subsequently, it is difficult and tiresome to find them and bring them back together again. The following quote exemplifies that:

“I found that some of the cataloguing as far as themes [were concerned] wasn’t very good… I actually think that some of it should be focused in one area. So this is the collection pertaining to so and so, and I know that it doesn’t fit Dewey, but he is American. He aha?â€?

In other words, the Maori have their own way of classifying their knowledge. If you try to re-classify it into a western system, it looses most of the meaning and logic for a Maori. Suddenly, they can't find anything anymore. To address this problem, the maori subject headings committee was recently created to provide a new taxonomy that's going to appropriate for this culture. They have developed a Iwi Hapū Names List (reflecting the importance of genealogy in Maori culture this was their first achievement), and are now working on a Maori subject list. The second thing I wanted to talk about is how, sometimes, limiting access can be culturally appropriate. Most information architects don't like the idea of limiting access - we're all about findability, remember? Too often limiting access serves the powerful. In this case, it serves the relatively powerless. A really important concept in Maori culture is "tapu". From the paper:

The word is usually translated to ‘sacred’ and sometimes to ‘set apart’. The tribal meeting house is sacred, as is the tribal knowledge. People are set apart for being warriors or priests. There are many meanings and attendant conditions of tapu, which are difficult to understand, particularly for non-Maori. For our purpose it may suffice to understand that tapu foremost represents the power of the creator, but other gods endow things and people with tapu as well. Tapu can be good or bad. A whole system of sanctification and nullification keeps the various forms of tapu in balance and life workable. Representations of people are very tapu, as are tribal genealogy, knowledge and ritual items. It does not matter whether the representations take the form of texts, pictures or carvings. They are only allowed to be used in their sacred, tribal, dignified environment with the attendant rituals in place and are treated with the utmost respect.

"Western" libraries contain a lot of the information and artefacts of Maori culture, and this open access is extremly frustrating for many Maori. The internet (including, perhaps, this article) makes things even worse. It may be hard to appreciate this desire for closedness, but it is an integral part of Maori culture. I am not sure how to deal with this, a big part of me wants to say "the Maori should accept openness, because it helps them find things", but another part of me understands that this is, deeply, a part of their culture, and should be respected. So not many answers in this post, just some thoughts around how some cultures have truly different ways of organizing the world than the western culture has, and how closedness is also a part of some cultures. Now, Maori culture is, in a way, for webdesign purposes, an edge case. In that most of us don't design websites or information architectures for the Maori. There are a lot of cultures like this, but you could argue that, for practical purposes, most of the websites we build are for mostly written cultures, and I wonder if similar cultural differences come into play there. Any ideas? Follow up reading:

• Whakapapa as a Maori Mental Construct

taxonomy | i18n | metadata | classification | information architecture

The crazy thing with writing a book is that it only starts to have an effect on your life years after you write it. I was just informed that my information architecture book is being translated into Japanese - pretty cool!

3 Metaphors for culture we use in Consulting Work

MultiLingual Computing, Inc.: MultiLingual Computing & Technology, Article Detail: there are still quite a few languages that aren't easily used on websites, due to font problems.

XML.com: Formal Taxonomies for the U.S. Government. Kinda dry article, but interesting for xml heads.

Rashmi's Blog: Google's pragmatic, data-driven approach to user interface design: so at Google (being a data company with a huge customer base), they user test with data: make a small change, show it to a subset of users, and track the results. Amazon uses this approach too.

Also: "The "I am Feeling Lucky" button is not used much. But their focus group participants always tell them they like it, and ask Google not to remove it (even though these participants have never used that button, nor do they ever intend to use it!). So its not all rationality and data driven design at Google!"

Peterme also follows up.

Joi Ito's Web: Another example of Japanese anti-foreigner bullshit: "We're going to figure out how to make foreigners more welcome in Japan before we turn into a bankrupt and forgotten country with a lot of starving old people."

Sounds like Europe :)

alex wright: "Back in the 1970s, Sanford (Sandy) Berman, the head cataloger at Hennepin County Library in Minnesota, did something librarians rarely do: He started making up his own subject headings."

An early tagger.

OK, I want to do Flickr-style related tags, but this is too hard-core techie for me to pull off, I'll need some help.

Let's say I have a database with a table TAGS, a table OBJECTS and a table TAGS2OBJECTS. If given the ID of a TAG, how can I find a list of ID's for related TAGS, in other words, tags that have been assigned to similar objects? Is it just a query or should I add some table or field to the tables?

Sneeuwstorm in New York

The evening of vloggercon there was a snowstorm (Quictime, about 3 Megs). It turns out filming in the snow is really, really cool, because not only do you get nice contrasts, it is also earily quiet (the snow dampens sound), so the sound you get is good.

ANT | ANT's Not Television: the beta is out: it's a desktop feedreader for videoblogs. Supercool - check it out if you have a Mac.

Summit Pre-Conference Program - ASIS&T 2005 Information Architecture Summit. The early registration deadline for the Information Architecture Institute's Leadership Seminar is January 28th, so sign up now! I'll be talking with Liv and Jorge about the state of global IA.

A Zero Configuration, All-In-One Podcasting Device For About $25 That My Mom Could Use. Nice.

Folksonomy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Folksonomy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Folksonomy is related to the concept of faceted classification from library science." Not it's not. And the page doesn't mention folk classification - a concept from social science and anthropology, so I added that.

Joho the Blog: Taxonomy Tales: the politics of categorization: "The New York Times index did not cite stories about concentration camps under the category "Jews" until 1950. It was not until 1975 that the index category "Nazi Policies Toward Jews" appeared." Another example of how classification is social and political are the race categories in the US census.

taxonomy

Webjay 1.0 launches!

Liz Lawley: Many-to-Many: social consequences of social tagging. Excellent post, focussing on the social aspects of tagging, and introducing a kinda nasty meme, "lowest-common-denominator classification", that I wish she hadn't introduced. I don't agree folksonomies necesarily represent a lowest common denominator classification - on the contrary. There are many experts out there that are not librarians that can give good tag. But Liz does identify some of the feedback mechanisms that encourage the lowest-c-d behaviour. Let's just change those feedback mechanisms.

My first Flemish videoblogging post (Quicktime, 250K, with subtitles). Mijn eerste Nederlandstalige videoblog post.

Vloggercon 2005 is over. It was brilliant, and historical. Vloggercon 2006 will have 500 people instead of the about 80 we got this year. But the amazing thing was: the 80 people were all the right people.

Remember, this was an unconference, pulled together in a few weeks by some people. No money involved. The wifi worked. There was cofee and bages. Nobody seems to have gotten hurt. The discussions were interesting. The vendors didn't take over. The audience got to speak - and really, it is silly to speak of "audience" because everyone was a presenter. Congratulations to everyone involved, and especially Jay, who really pulled this one together with good vibes and hard work.

Flickr: Photos tagged with vloggercon

Raymond's first day in nyc - pe-vloggercon (Quicktime, 800K)

Blackbeltjones/work: Wikipedia: Shirky / (Tufte x Wattenburg) = ?: sparklines for wikipedia!

Eric Scheid pointed me to Guidelines for Forming Language Equivalents: A Model Based on the Art & Architecture Thesaurus. I will report in more depth on this later.

I have a problem with backing up files to my external harddrive (on Win XP).

When I drag a large folder (a few gigs) to the harddrive, it starts copying, but after a while (5 minutes), the harddrive "dissapears" - it no longer shows up in my list of drives, and the copy gives an error. I have to then unplug the harddrive and plug it in again to make it show up again in my list of drives.

I have this problem with 2 computers, and with 2 external harddrives, so I don't think it's a problem with either the computer or the drive. Small folders are ok, it's just the larger folders that show this problem.

Is it impossible to back up large folders by just dragging them? Should I use a backup program? If so, which one is good (and cheap or free)? PC Magazine recommends the free SynchBack so I'm trying that out.

Later: damn! I tried but the same problem happened, after copying for 5 minutes, the outside drive just 'dissapeared" from my computer, and the copy program reports an error. So it's not just with drag and drop, it's any copying to those drives (remember I have 2) that makes them "dissapear' from windows. Any ideas?

Later: I ran Windows update and all, tried again, still the same problem.

Later: This article seems to describe the problem, in short: Windows XP can have problems with harddrives larger than 138Gigs, upgrade to Service Pack 2 (something I've been holding off on) to fix it.

Later: I successfully installed Service Pack 2, after it crashed on me once. I tried again, STILL the same problem. Arg.

Later: Alright, I am downloading more updates from the Windows Update site. The words "critical update", "strongly recommend" and "security" were plastered all over the page so I figured I'd better say yes.

Later: I installed all latest Windows updates, doublechecked again (no updates), restarted, tried again, and fuck: still the same problem.

I am running out of ideas here...

alex wright has some follow-up musings on my i18n folksonomy post. Gene Smith also weighs in.

Signal vs. Noise launches a free todo list app. Brilliant move, again.

I and the others guessed right: Six Log: Support for nofollow: Google approached blogging companies to implement support for nofollow.

monkey methods: 5 Reasons Why Feedster and Technorati will Die, with some pretty good comments.

Steve Arnold pointed out to me that "Languages that are synthetic do not fare well in automatic systems unless the source documents are highly technical."

Which makes sense, once you understand what a synthetic language is. A synthetic language combines bits into really long words. For example, in Mohawk: Washakotya'tawitsherahetkvhta'se = "He ruined her dress" (strictly, "He made the thing that one puts on one's body ugly for her"). One word is used for something that other languages need a multiple words or a whole sentence for. You can see how that can mess with automated systems.

Languages are not synthetic or isolating, they fall into a spectrum: some languages are just more synthetic than others. Examples of common synthetic languages are German, Russian, Turkish, Finnish, Japanese, Korean, and many more.

I came accross this other interesting paper on multi-lingual search. Internet Searching and Browsing in a Multilingual World: An Experiment on the Chinese Business Intelligence Portal (CBizPort) (PDF) Journal of the American society for information science and technology —July 2004. It gives some good practical background on a project to create a business search for Chinese. It also describes an approach to automatically summarizing and categorizing search results. Here is its description of the Chinese search landscape, illustrating some interesting language-locale subtleties.

"Chinese is the primary language used by people in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Language encoding, vocabularies, economies, and societies of the three regions differ signiï¬?cantly. Regional search engines, therefore, have been developed to provide Internet searching. In mainland China, the major search engines include Sina and Baidu. Baidu currently powers over 80% of Internet search services in China, including ChinaRen, 163.net, etc. The database of Baidu stores over 60 million Web pages collected from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, and grows at a speed of several hundreds of thousands of Web pages per day. Sina is an Internet portal providing comprehensive services such as Web searching, e-mail, news, business directory, entertainment, weather forecast, etc. From our review of search engines in mainland China, we found that Baidu has better search capabilities than the others, as shown by its content coverage. Sina has a wider scope of functions than Baidu. In Taiwan, the two major Internet search portals are Openï¬?nd and Yam. Openï¬?nd, established in 1998, is one of the largest portals in Taiwan. In addition to basic searching, Openï¬?nd suggests terms that are highly associated with users’ queries to help them reï¬?ne their search. It also allows users to ï¬?nd more related items from each search result and highlights the query terms in the results. Established in 1995, Yam provides comprehensive online services. Its four major focuses are content, communication, community, and commerce (4C). Yam’s search engine allows users to search various media: Web sites, Web pages, news, Internet forum messages, and activities (in 18 Taiwan cities or regions). We found that Openï¬?nd has better functionality and content coverage, but Yam was better established in the local market (e.g., it powers the search function of the Taiwan government’s Web sites). In Hong Kong, due to its bilingual culture, people rely on both English and Chinese when accessing and searching the Internet. Major search portals include Yahoo Hong Kong and Timway. Of these, Yahoo Hong Kong is one of the most popular. Yahoo Hong Kong’s search engine returns results in different categories, Web sites, Web pages, and news. Headquartered in Hong Kong, Timway provides services such as Web searching, Web directory, e-mail, news, forums, etc. Its database stores over 30,000 Hong Kong Web sites and over 10 million Web pages. "

In other words, it's not because Chinese is a language, that one Chinese search engine will be enough for the various users that want to search in Chinese. There are different groups of people who search in Chinese, with different local requirements, and this local requirement has given rise to a number of different search engines for Chinese.

A Framework for Multilingual Searching and Meta-information Extraction: what is "term isolation"? "Term isolations means extracting the individual terms from the text. This is necessary for languages such as Chinese and Japanese, that do not contain white space between individual terms. Term isolation is not a trivial task, and requires the software to understand the language's grammar and have a complete dictionary. Term isolation is clearly a language-specific task (with different software modules for different languages)."

Multi-lingual search

How do you know what language the query a user entered is in, and how do you search languages like Japanese, that don't use spaces between the words? And how do you identify languages used in an unstructured, multi-lingual document? Multilingual search is a hard problem.

Most of the search players all use the same basic technology provided by Basistech, check out their customer list: Google, Amazon, MSN, Yahoo, Endeca, Peoplesoft, Overture, you name it, they have them.

The technology, called the Rosette Linguistic Platform, "helps your applications unlock the meaning of unstructured text by determining the language and encoding of a given document, converting the text to Unicode so that it can be processed, identifying the basic linguistic features and structure, and locating key concepts like the names of people and places."

In other words, it deals with Asian and Arabic language search problems, and does entity extraction (extracting names of people, places and companies and such). It identifies individual words for languages such as Japanese that do not use spaces between words, breaks compound words into their individual components, and identifies parts-of-speech such as verb, adjective, etc.

Once it has done its job making sense of the languages it finds, the search technology of the vendor takes over.

They have a pretty cool demo that explains what the technology does - here's a screenshot:

Google hits comment spammers hard?

Simon thinks Google will soon announce that they won't be calculating PageRank for links with a rel="nofollow" attribute. And he's probably right, it makes complete sense for Google to do this. DaveWiner has a "mysterious" announcement coming up, and if you view source you see he has the rel="nofollow" implemented.

There are two ways rel="nofollow" could work: either Google simply doesn't follow these links, or they don't attach Pagerank to these links. As opposed to Simon, I think it is probably the first. It makes semantically more sense. It's probably easier to implement for them as well. Also, Pagerank has become less and less important in Google algorythms over the years.

This means that you just add this attribute to all the links that are added by users, like links in comments. You don't add it to the links in your blog posts. People can still follow ALL links, but search engines (only Google for now) would only follow the links in your blogposts. The stuff *you* link to in your blogposts still gets yummy Pagerank goodness - your blog doesn't loose its Google power.

And more importantly, Google doesn't loose its blog power - it can still take advantage of the meaning embedded in the links on blogs, just without much of the pollution. I can even see them implementing a little Pagerank boost for outgoing links on a domain that does have some rel="nofollow" links implemented, since it means that the links that don't have that attribute are probably somewhat more meaningful.

When you do this, the incentive for spammers to spam you (increased Pagerank) is pretty much taken away. Comment spammers don't do it in the hope that some human will follow that link. They're in it for the Pagerank.

The amount of spam you get won't diminish immediately - spammers use automated tools and don't really care about whether it works on a particular blog. But if the majority of blogs implements this, then it will become less and less attractive for comment spammers to spend time comment spamming.

This is where hosted services like Blogger (owned by Google) or Typepad really shine. I expect them to support this from the moment of announcement on, making the majority of blogs protected against spam. It wouldn't make sense for Google to implement this and not let Six Apart (owners of Typepad) know about it - that would be abusing their search engine power a bit.

The most popular blogging packages would support this as well, and as people slowly upgrade to new versions, within a year or so 80 to 90% (I'm making these numbers up) of blogs will be protected. OK, who makes the condom-like logo that says "my blog is spam protected"?

Not everyone is optimistic though.

An open question: as Google looses some of its dominance in the search world, will other search engines start supporting this? If not, the measure may not be as effective as we hope.

Will this stop comment spamming? Not right now. Will it stop the growth of comment spamming? Hopefully.

Then again, this may all be wrong, since Dave supposedly left a comment saying "Pssst. Good work. You're getting warmer. ;->"

Follow this story on Technorati.

Smart Mobs: Cameraphone as Conversational Medium: "Daisuke Okabe has just published Emergent Social Practices, Situations and Relations
through Everyday Camera Phone Use, her report on the research she conducted with Mizuko Ito. The continuous sharing of image-streams with social networks seems to be developing as a hybrid of technological artifact and mediated discourse -- friends self-surveill and share what they are seeing as they move through the world, through their day."

From the comments: How and why people use cameraphones (PDF).

We're seeing some of this happening in the videoblogging group as well.

Nick Finch (?) writes about content and locales and the problems with continents, but I can't seem to contact him.

I linked to another website with this post, that I found via Technorati, and I now suspect that that other website was a fake blog meant to create Pagerank, populated automatically from various feeds. Evil.

I fucking HATE that Blogger requires you to open a fucking account just to leave a fucking comment. Sorry Google, but that's being worse than Microsoft.

In the year 2014, the New York Times has ceased to exist.

Emergent i18n effects in folksonomies

My series of posts on international information architecture:

1. Translating taxonomies and categories
2. Translating categories, translating terms
3. Translating the Dewey Decimal Classification system
4. Designing the relationship between content and locales
5. Emergent i18n effects in folksonomies (this post)
6. The Maori versus Dewey, and why limiting access can be culturally appropriate.

Folksonomies are taxonomies created by users who add tags to things. Folksonomies are messy and have a lot of problems, but their great merit is that they're scalable and they use the users' terminology by definition, a serious problem with more classic taxonomies that are created by information architects or librarians. There is a lot of innovation happening around folksonomies. One interesting area is internationalization. Users enter tags in many languages, but generally, the system does not know what language a tag is in. Have a look at a screenshot of this page from Technorati, showing popular tags: I drew big red lines around them, so you'll probably notice some tags in other languages than English. "Algemeen - Algemein - Algemeines" means "general" in Dutch and German. "Entertainment Entretenimento" is English-Spanish for entertainment. Notice that a misspelling of "Entretenimiento" is also used. But we are talking about languages today, not spelling. "Music - Musique - Música" are English, French and Spanish. So what's going on here? People are tagging things in many languages. Right now, Technorati displays the various languages mixed together on one page. That's pretty interesting, expecially if you're interested in languages like me. But it might also be cool to see only tags in your language. Especially if you don't speak English. How can we do this? One way is to use a dictionary lookup to figure out what language a certain tag is in. It won't be perfect, but this approach could be used to display a page of popular tags in mostly German, mostly English, mostly Hindi and so on. This will reduce the amount of tags available to the user, but make them more relevant to them (because they are in their language). Again, seeing a few non-English tags won't bother you, but this is not for English speakers - the dominant language. For all the people who don't speak English, seeing tags in their language will be invaluable. If you do dictionary lookup only with popular tags, it shouldn't be too resource-expensive - a tag only has to be checked once against the dictionary, and assigned a probable language. Another way is to look at the language of the source (rss feed, ...) and assume the tag is in the same language. Tricky - I'm not sure this will work. There might be other algorythms as well - if I do a Google search for "Música", it knows this isn't English, because it asks me if I want to "Search for English results only", so there is some algorythm going on there I assume (unless they also use the dictionary approach). Later: I realized something else. Displaying tags in mostly some language, as opposed to exclusively in that language, is not necessarily a bug, it might be a feature. Many user populations around the world incorporate words in multiple languages in their vocabulary. The language namespaces I am talking about might not map perfectly to a specific language, but include words in other languages, and slang and such, and in this way be a much better representation of the real language of a certain user population than if we were to just use one language. So it's not so much about language namespaces, it's more about user population namespaces. Language is just a starting point and might be an easy way to group user populations. As an aside, I think the real innovation with folksonomies will come from creating algorythms. It's all about scalability. The way Google's superior algorythm in search made them the nr1 search engine, someone will invent superior algorythms in tagging and this may make them the nr1 tagging engine. Back to languages. The most interesting aspect of the screenshot above isn't that there are tags in other languages, is that the tags are the same in other languages. The tags in French and Spanish and such have their English translations right on the same page. This suggests that people seem to tag things similarly in different languages. Is there a way to create algorythms that take advantage of this fact? Also take into account that different people can tag the same things (pictures, bookmarks, ...), in different languages. An interesting language effect with tags was pointed out by Tanya, on this Flickr page for the tag chat. "Chat" means cat in French. Here's a screenshot: So different people have used "chat" and "cat" to tag similar items, and as a result Flickr knows that "chat" and "cat" are related tags. I'm not sure what that means for internationalization of folksonomies, but as an emergent i18n effect I think that's pretty amazing. A third and similar i18n effect I found when playing around with this in Flickr is that of language namespaces. If you start following related tags in Flickr in a certain language, you will see many tags in that language. Here's a screenshot of the tag "leuk", which means "funny" in Dutch. The related tags are in English, but in the see also tags we see a whole bunch of Dutch words: "ik, konijn, middelharnis, mooi, oudetonge, overflakkee, plankje". And if you follow those you'll see more Dutch words in the related and see-also tags, creating a kind of Dutch namespace almost. Again, I'm not sure how to use this exactly, but it's pretty amazing to me that, in this early stage, there are already interesting i18n effects happening in the tagging space. Comments welcome! taxonomy | i18n | metadata | classification | information architecture | folksonomy

Technorati has started to aggregate and combine tags from feeds (it uses categories), Flickr and Del.icio.us. Here's an example page: Technorati: Tag: humor. They support the rel=tag attribute. It's brilliant.

Innovation around folksonomies is going fast, a lot of it driven I think by David Weinberger, who is writing a book about tagging and taxonomies and such, and is blogging about this stuff all the time, and happens to be on the board of Technorati. I'm excited - this is great stuff. I am also starting to experiment with tags on me-tv, a videoblog aggregator project of mine.