magpie's shiny things

Tagging had got­ten every­where. It’s the lat­est “got­ta have” for your web­site. Gotta have tag­ging and one of those cool cloud things in the right hand col­umn. But tag clouds are often just so much noise. Can’t tag­ging be put to bet­ter use?Did you know that there is tag­ging in Amazon? Six months ago it did­n’t seem to be used much. Now it seems to be gain­ing enough mass to be useful.

A cou­ple of examples.

The Little Green Book of Getting Your Way (a business/negotiation book).

It ranks #366 on Amazon’s sales list and has 47 reviews. It has twen­ty tags. The top tag is per­sua­sion.

Clicking through on per­sua­sion gets you a pret­ty use­ful list­ing of books.

Eight of the first ten books tagged per­sua­sion are busi­ness titles. Most like­ly what you’d be look­ing for if you start­ed with the Little Green Book. (The top book is of course some guy tar­get­ed dat­ing book and there’s the odd­i­ty in place ninth place: “None but You” based on Jane Austen’s Persuasion.)

Now let’s try some­thing a lit­tle less common.

Setting UP LAMP (just because it’s on my desk at the moment)

Ranks #67,422 and has 19 reviews. There are 9 tags, three peo­ple tagged it lamp and there are 8 oth­er sin­gle­ton tags. All the tags make sense.

Clicking on the lamp tag gets you… well books on LAMP yes but also a lot of light­ing fix­tures. Two light­ing fix­tures in the top ten and then it lights all the way down to the 27th item. The lists and guides aren’t use­ful. (You can get some help from the tag cloud at the bot­tom of the page though.) The sec­ond tag on the prod­uct page. books-computer-tools leads to a use­ful, though obvi­ous­ly pri­vate­ly mean­ing­ful, list­ing of books that you might want on your desk if you were work­ing with LAMP.

Note that the tag pages have a link to the lists (ListMania and So You’d Like To…) that have been tagged with your cho­sen term. Though in the first exam­ple (per­sua­sion) four of the five are blunt­ly aimed at becom­ing a bet­ter pick up artist. The two for lamp are a col­lec­tion of Smooth Jazz music and a list of home decor books. Not ready for prime time? Or maybe just bad exam­ple choic­es on my part.

As an aside, I like the new rollovers for the prod­uct pictures

When you’re look­ing at a prod­uct pic­ture on one of the lists — like the tagged items list — you roll over the pic­ture and get a brief descrip­tion of the item includ­ing price and rating.

Last week ago I wrote about the big blue bin virus that struck our neigh­bor­hood. While I was pon­der­ing that par­tic­u­lar post over my morn­ing tea I vague­ly remem­bered see­ing some­thing inter­est­ing along the same lines a day or two ago- or rather a pos­si­ble expla­na­tion of the mech­a­nism that caus­es weird behav­iors like putting out big blue bins on the wrong day.

But that’s all I had to go on. That and vague mem­o­ry that the web page had blue stuff on it and that the word “fol­low­ing” was used a lot. Do you see my prob­lem? There’s no way I can craft a set of search terms that’s going to find that out of all the stuff on the entire web.

Where I might have luck find­ing it is in the set of web pages that I had viewed in the pre­vi­ous 3 or 4 days. I have access to a list of those pages in my brows­er his­to­ry. And I could cer­tain­ly nar­row down the list of pos­si­ble pages by search­ing for some words like “behav­ior” and “social” and “fol­low­ing”. That would give me a short list of prob­a­bly 20 or 30 pages. Not a mis­sile at the heart of the prob­lem but a decent enough shot­gun approach that I can prob­a­bly find my nee­dle because the haystack has got­ten a lot small­er. (ouch, that metaphor mixed some­thing fierce.)

But how am I sup­posed to search just those pages? The lit­tle search bar at the top of the his­to­ry side­bar search­es the titles of the pages. Good for find­ing the CommonCraft video that explains wikis in plain eng­lish which has a good descrip­tive page title (and one that I can remem­ber.) but not so good for look­ing for some­thing that I don’t have a word for.

This morn­ing’s dur­ing the slog up tread­mill hill I read through Wm. Denton’s How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It on the Web.

I’ll have a lot more to say about it in a cou­ple of days. (Beware.)

This morn­ing I only want to point you to the sec­tion 4.2: Faceted Navigation: Three Questions and Four Principles. I love his fourth principle:

The URL is the nota­tion for the clas­si­fi­ca­tion. It should be com­pact, comprehensible,and editable. When a knowl­edge­able user exam­ines it he or she should be able to under­stand how it is built and how edit­ing it could lead to oth­er entities.

Technically this can be a roy­al pain in the ass to cre­ate and many will argue that it is only use­ful for the uber-geeks. But think on it. How often have you gone to a book­marked page and then chopped off it’s tail or altered a word or two to get some place when you did­n’t feel like typ­ing in some big ass ole URL?

Bliss…

This lit­tle gem is not for the faint of heart. I wish “A Simplified Model for Facet Classification” had been around when I was strug­gling with Ranganathan’s colon clas­si­fi­ca­tion scheme in library school. I, and I believe many oth­er LIS stu­dents of my time, were entire­ly put off the idea of faceted clas­si­fi­ca­tion by the expe­ri­ence. A shame real­ly because facets are one of the most use­ful tools for wran­gling mas­sive amounts of stuff that has too many things in com­mon to make full text based search­ing useful.

Dr. Spiteri’s overview (and meld­ing) of Ranganathan’s work and the lat­er work of the Classification Research Group takes a bit of the sting out the mem­o­ries of all those Canons, Postulates, and Principles. (Not to men­tion the den­si­ty of R’s language.)

If you need refresh­er on the basic tenets of faceted clas­si­fi­ca­tion this is a good place to get it. But is you don’t already have some back­ground in clas­si­fi­ca­tion you’ll be lost in minutes.

I’m still look­ing for exam­ples of using facets to describe sys­tems (rather than retrieve infor­ma­tion.) Opaque request, huh? I guess I’ll just have to go and build one of my own.

We live in a place that has “curb­side recy­cling.” Kind of a stretch con­sid­er­ing the near­est curb is 9 miles from here but… Every oth­er week we put a huge blue wheel­ie bin in the buck­et of the trac­tor and haul it down to the coun­ty road to be picked up. (The green bins are for trash and they go out every week.)

Being every oth­er week there are of course some Thursday evenings when the most press­ing ques­tion is “Is this a recy­cling week?” There’s a lit­tle cal­en­dar in the fridge that answers this ques­tion when we’re not sure.

A cou­ple of weeks ago we duti­ful­ly loaded up the big blue bin and hauled it out to the road where it joined it’s fel­lows. The next day on the way to PO I saw lots of blue bins care­ful­ly lined up along the coun­ty road — all as it should be.

Until Friday night (okay, Saturday morn­ing) when I took the trac­tor down to the road to pick up the bins. Uh, the recy­cling bin is still full. What’s with that? Hey all the recy­cling bins are full. Idiots did­n’t pick up, I hate that now I have to haul a full bin back and it’s full and we won’t have any­where to throw the paper… and you get the idea.

But before I go off all pissed on some poor phone-answering cus­tomer ser­vice dweeb maybe I should check the sched­ule. Uh… huh?… real­ly? It’s not a recy­cling week. Says so right here on the sched­ule. So what’s up with that?

I have got­ten the week wrong before and either not tak­en the bin down when I should or tak­en it down when I should­n’t. What makes this inci­dent weird is that so many peo­ple put out their bins on the wrong week. Not just the five of us who live up here on our (dirt) road but peo­ple all up and down the coun­ty road. It was a vast line of big blue bins. Why?

A lit­tle thought and a lit­tle house­hold dis­cus­sion answered the question.

Me: Did you check the cal­en­dar yesterday?

Him: No, did you?

Me: No. But every­one else had put their big blue bins out so I took ours to the road.

Just enough peo­ple made the mis­take of tak­ing the big blue bin to the road on the wrong day to start a cascade.

And a lot of those bins stayed right there in their nice tidy lines wait­ing for recy­cling week, next Thursday.

Thanks to Black Dog for the photos.