Lee Bryant from Headshift Moments is talking about Social Tagging. Am really enjoying his presentation. He shares how he implemented Social Tagging for BBC News. Bookmarked and tagged stories of interest.  Overcomes a limiting culture - fits the reboot/remixing culture - I tag and bookmark stories in my own way. Another example of local aggregation of news, blogs, links, photos, govt info for a small group in Brixton. Objective was to build up a body of content over the where surfacing themes and issues derived from linkages derived from text analysis. 18,000 keyword stems emerged.

A thrid application - perspective on Mental Health - one of the issues was to define the taxonomy - but that wouldn't work as it would be imposing a top-down view on the community.  So, combined top-down data with bottoms-up tagging.  Lesbian and gay groups started adopting tags early - themes emerging - a drive towards negotiating shared meaning in a vast field.

Social Tags Tomorrow - Lee suggests we need to humanise the enterprise by escaping the deadzone of taxonomies.  Instead, use aggregation for search, shared tags and bookmarks for structured language, weblogs as sense-making networks and wikis as action spaces. Benefit for users - they wont need to mess with messy CMS systems that dont work.

As a commenter at the session said, social tagging could well bypass really expensive market research projects!  My question to Lee was how do you get companies to accept and buy-in to this bottom-up approach, when it really means relinquishing control.  Lee's advice - point out what isn't working, show them how they can build on top of what they have. 

I'd love to discuss this some more - Ton has much to add here too. 

5:02:33 PM    comment []  trackback []

Just attended Cory Doctorow's keynote address - Europe's Coming Broadcast Flag and Christian Lindholm - What is mobile life really about – Towards the seamless interplay between Hardware, Applications and Services.  Cory made an appeal :

"Don’t let Hollywood’s iron heel come down on your life, your technology, your privacy, your artists and your social institutions—fight back and win the Broadcast Flag fight in Europe, too!"

Good lesson for Asia too.  

The Nokia presentation was disappointing - it was about what you can do with a Nokia phone today - cam phones and lifeblog - don't we all know that already?  It didnot touch upon bigger issues of how manufacturers of cell phones are gearing up for VOIP applications, what they are doing to embrace the open web.   He spent a lot of time on the cam phone aspects but didn't talk us through how mobile technology is about communications or networking or better quality sound or video.

Malthe Sigurdsson is on now and talking about The Skype Brand - he is sharing the Skype philosophy of keeping it simple and opening up through the forums and developer community - it works !  The room is crowded with people squatting on the floor - just shows the interest in Skype here. More on his talk here.

Questions:

How do you make money and how do you decide how much money you make ?  Answer - VC, building userbase - plenty of money to go around, paid-for services where potential for revenues, tie-ups with hardware manufacturers, etc

Rumour - Yahoo buying Skype ? - Answer - there's so much more for Skype to do than being bought over by someone.

Can we buy stock? Answer - yeah we have stickers here :):)

Payment issues - Answer - being worked on - perhaps develop hubs.

It was lovely sharing a table with Jaanus who runs the Skype blog at the London Geek Dinner last week - we talked about India and I shared my Skype wonder with him - I also gave him my Skype wishlist - Skype on cell phones, Skype with video.  He's listening :)

3:08:20 PM    comment []  trackback []