There is an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion with David Wein­berger (author of “Every­thing is mis­cel­la­neous”) going on at the Well about folk­sonomies and metadata.

> Tag maps v5

PS: 12 days to go, wish me luck!

My the­sis is due pretty soon, so I am cur­rently writ­ing A LOT and make some on–the–go beau­ti­fi­ca­tions to my experiments.

First one is the emerg­ing top­ics his­togram. I fol­lowed my own advice and ver­ti­cally cen­tered the stacked his­togram. Addi­tion­ally, I never liked those sharp edges, so now I do not only “fade out” tags visu­ally, but also fade them in, result­ing in a much more organic pic­ture, and largely improved read­abil­ity of the chart. New color scheme: old tags are cold, freshly intro­duced ones in warm color. This is all very much inspired by the fab­u­lous last.fm charts by Lee Byron — thanks!

new inter­ac­tive ver­sion here

and some pix:

Another visual exper­i­ment on tag­ging: How do indi­vid­u­als use tags — com­pared to the com­mu­nity? Do you use pri­vate lan­guage or are you a main­stream tag­ger? When you tag with “design” — do the oth­ers think it is “art”?

On the left: the per­sonal tags for the per­sonal book­marks — ordered by fre­quency — the con­tain­ing box per is log-scaled so you get an impres­sion of the long–tail posi­tion of a tag. Which means: Often used tags are large, bright and go to the top.

On the right: com­mu­nity tags for the tagged ressources.

In the mid­dle: tags with the same name are con­nected. If a line is hor­i­zon­tal, the ind­vid­ual and the com­mu­nity essen­tially agree on the rel­e­vance of the tag for the ressources. The steeper it is — the larger the dis­agree­ment. If no line starts at a tag, it means it is not present in the other list

So in the pic­ture above, you can see my tags. Same facts you can read from the pic­ture: • “m.a.thesis” is a very often used, but pri­vate tag of mine. • The ressources I tag in gen­eral are mostly tagged with “design” by the com­mu­nity. I, how­ever, use the tag “design” much less often. • “news”, “seman­tic web”, “web­dev” are tags I use often, but not the com­mu­nity. etc.

And often course, you can click indi­vid­ual tags to see what the com­par­i­son is like for sub­sets of the book­marks. That’s espe­cially inter­est­ing for obscure tags like “guru” — you can see what the tag­ger “means” by look­ing at the dis­tri­b­u­tion of the com­mu­nity book­marks (in this case “design — art — pro­gram­mer — artist”). Interesting!

Some more shots:

I wish I could say “click here for the inter­ac­tive ver­sion” as usual — but unfor­tu­nately, del.icio.us offers a JSON API, but did not put a crossdomain.xml file on their server. Which means the visu­al­iza­tion (which runs nicely on my hard­disc) can­not load data when put in the web. Bum­mer. I hope I can fig­ure some­thing out.

So for now — I can only offer a down­load link. Click the index.html. You might have to adjust you Flash player secu­rity set­tings in order to load the com­mu­nity tags. Caveat: The appli­ca­tion is still a bit buggy and pretty heavy con­cern­ing proces­sor ressources.

I am hav­ing fun here with a lit­tle cus­tom made Flash app that reads • hourly shots from my built-in web­cam • my twit­ter posts • and my deli­cious bookmarks

and puts it all together. Bit messy at the moment, but I am work­ing on it.

Big­ger pic­ture here.