Social Interfaces (Lee Bryant)
Posted: June 14th, 2005 | 14 Comments »He was talking about “Negotiating Language and Meaning with Social Tagging”. He’s running headshift the company who is behind the famous bbc tags (but only one of their many interesting projects). You will probably (and just like me) learn a few things here so here we go:
1st: we have to share a situation
2nd: we need to share a common perception of things (ex: ability to see the same thing)
3rd: we need to share the same cognition (ex: categorization, interpretation of things)
4th: we need to have a common language
Language is interesting, because it actually evolves over time to describe a concept. Here is an interesting graph from some french researchers (I couldn’t grab the url sorry):
Conclusion: polysemy (spell checker proposes “polygamy” for that…) often declines quickly for new concepts as dominant terms emerge.
Tags are a useful tool for this: reducing the number of terms used to describe something.
Their most famous piece of work. You can tag a story. From here you can: – see all stories tagged with that same word – see delicious links tagged with that word – see blog posts (via technorati) – see flickr pictures
Nice, tyni app. Juste what you would expect. I’m saying that this should be the default on all websites.
The idea here is to integrate all information related to the city in one place. So news, blogs, links but also official information. The system grabs the information, derives common themes from content then lets people create tags to link content together and navigate it.
Lee gave a few figures on the project:
18’000 different words the first year
100-650 recurring themes
These people have a vocabulary problem. They don’t use the same thing to designate the same information. So they built a website that gives access to information that people can then classify their own way. You do some topic mapping from tags. If for you “Mental” and “Retarded” equal to “French soccer fan” then you can merge these two tags into that new name. You’ll get further information this way (FSF), not the way it has been entered by the publisher.
Amazing project (a big part of it comes from the fact it’s for the NHS and will reach so many people) to get feedback from people on medical services without using forms of pre defined language. These guys actually try to bridge the gap between two worlds (the people, the NHS) that each has it’s own words and structure. Actually every single person has it’s own words and structure.
So the system works the following: – patients send unstructured feedback to the system – text analysis identifies patterns it matches with the NHS taxonomies – the system constantly improves by analysing tag clouds generated by people.
Interesting supplementary note: after the conference I talked to Lee and he said that they actually ask people to tag their information, but also ask for a “mood stamp”. They have to say if the send a complaint or a praise. That allows better interpretation of some ambiguous tags.
A great visual answer that I struggled to reproduced in 5 sec while the slide was up. Amazingly slides are not available during the presentation on the reboot wiki (will come for reboot8 me thinks).
The graphic kind of speaks for itself. People (at a personal level) wil receive information from data stores via feeds and, in return, provide links via tags. Groups of people will have the same kind of two way interaction with directories, feeds and links. To allow groups to interact with data stores and individuals to interact with directories we will need to build light social interfaces the way these guys are doing. Take a long look at this thing it’s quite interesting.
slides are coming. Give me a break – I just got home!
slides are coming. Give me a break – I just got home!
that was an ironic comment don’t bother lee. I feel funny that we manage to have all the less useful information (IRC chats) in real time but not the slides. btw I took a picture of your graph and will post it as it looks much better than my ppt reproduction.
that was an ironic comment don’t bother lee. I feel funny that we manage to have all the less useful information (IRC chats) in real time but not the slides. btw I took a picture of your graph and will post it as it looks much better than my ppt reproduction.
Great report Laurent
much more accurate than my own notes
helped me understand better Lee’s Ideas and exemples
Many many thanks for your work
Great report Laurent
much more accurate than my own notes
helped me understand better Lee’s Ideas and exemples
Many many thanks for your work
Hi there french man :-)
Only one of FOUR froggies (Alexis, Loic, Dominique and me) attending reboot, the conference for “european practical visionaries”. No hasty conclusions please ;-)
Hi there french man :-)
Only one of FOUR froggies (Alexis, Loic, Dominique and me) attending reboot, the conference for “european practical visionaries”. No hasty conclusions please ;-)
it’s a shame I could not make it :(
it’s a shame I could not make it :(
And it’s a shame your comments still don’t work! On that last video game fair in Lyon, if you can save one or two tickets you know my number ;-)
And it’s a shame your comments still don’t work! On that last video game fair in Lyon, if you can save one or two tickets you know my number ;-)
ok ;)
and actually my comments works, I just have to approve them (even thought the captcha is screwed it works)
ok ;)
and actually my comments works, I just have to approve them (even thought the captcha is screwed it works)