Lunch Blogging
Today’s lunch guest is Joshua Schacter, who did delicious; turns out he also did memepool, which was metafilter before it was metafilter. So, wow, he is multiply cool.
The chinese firewall apparently blocks delicious; I think that’s probably a good sign you’re doing something interesting.
There are about 500K unique tags- that growth is leveling off, obviously.
Hard core tech tags are declining, from something like 25% to 17%. Interests of users are starting to get more diverse.
They have bought delicious.com to make the url a little easier :)
Have given some thought to cross-site tagging integration (delicious, flickr, technorati, etc.), but thinks that the semantics for each are different enough to make it more complicated than it looks.
Will probably eventually add ads for non-logged in folks; logged in folks are giving them information and hence are paying their own way.
Describes tagging as the least possible work which still creates some signal.
Later, over dinner: notes that he doesn’t use the word folksonomy, because it implies that it replaces taxonomy. He thinks of tags as words that help you remember, rather than words that help you classify. Memory is the itch you primarily scratch with the tags; discovery (i.e., the result of categorization) is not a primary itch so is a nice side-effect.
Notes that popularity is not the only way that links are interesting- if 9,000 people bookmark /., that’s not interesting, but if 1 other person bookmarks some random site, you and that person have some kind of useful link. So he is thinking about that and how to represent it usefully.
Notes that there are two types of clusters- one in which a human identifies a cluster of things that they believe are similar; and the other in which people apply different terms to similar/same objects.
People search differently than they tag, even though they are sort of flipsides of the same thing. For example, people tag meat products as ‘bacon’, but tag the oracle of bacon as ‘movie’. You’d want a search for ‘bacon’ to return both, which complicates things a bit.
Some interesting links: http://www.siderean.com/facetious/facetious.jsp and http://kevan.org/extispicious. Best: http://blueslugs.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2005/07/12/tag1-delicious-style-file-tagging/- someone has done tag(1) for file systems. I still want my file selector and save dialogs to be tag-based, dammit… someone get on that :)