Web 2.0

Preparing for the class discussion I have tried to get a concept of what Web 2.0 is and underline some critical points. I went trough a wide range of information sources (including Tim O'Reilly paper, of course) attempting to concentrate on key things such as publishing, user participation, effective communication and content.

In my vision Web 2.0 brings 4 primary things together:
1) Search
The value of online data is really significant, cause people spend more and more time obtaining information from the web cutting other activities at the same time (e.g. TV, other traditional media sources)
2) Tools and applications
Google shows fresh approach to many areas of user daily activity building new web services, e.g. Calendar, Picasa, Earth, Maps, etc. Moreover Google also demonstrated new approach to online advertisment, AdSense shows context ad directly related to user search. The successfull model of promotion is unobtrusive and that's exactly what makes a difference between DoubleClick and AdSense. describe Amazon, Ebay models. commercial success.
3) Content and publishing
Users are learning how to communicate directly to other users. The content of webpage sometimes defined not by the publusher, but by the people who use that webpage. Publishing is playing the role of aggregating and giving people free space to sound their thoughts and ideas. I suppose that is one of the reasons that make blogging so popular. Blog sites like Brad Fitzpatrick's LiveJournal, for example, is almost a media brand.
Besides I find out that the relationships between producer, publisher and user have been changed. Publishers don't often get the reward, the middle man (or middleware:-) get the reward instead. Good examples are music and video industry. For instance, if you download the video from YouTube or Google Video, you will recommend the service to others not mentioning the producer of that particular video.

4) Community

to be continued...

Folksonomies

What is that?

Folsksonomy is a type of distributed user-created classification system. Unlike traditional classification system (e.g. Dublin Core) folksonomy categorizes web content with user created tags based on their own vocabulary. The term folksonomy is a combination of words folk and taxonomy (descending from Greek words "taxis"-classification and "nomos"-management). Because folksonomy is Internet based technology this term often refers to tagging systems created by online user communities.
Most authors suppose that folksonomy is not an alternative to formal classification system, but it is an additional way to organize information and search results.

How does it work?

Generally speaking users describe objects by assigning tags to different types of online content such as images, bookmarks, videos, etc.
Well known examples of folksonomic systems are del.icio.us and Flickr, where users create a data containing the description of data,what's called metadata.

Strengths	Weaknesses
Browsing vs. Search Folksonomic system allows users to explore information in sometimes unexpected web locations, which also are unlikely to find using standard search	No homonym control No control over same words that have different meaning, e.g. word 'ant' can mean an insect or Apache Ant Project(windows,anchor are also homonym words)
Required classification Folksonomy differs from traditional classification approach, because it represents the classification demanded by the majority of users. One of the main reasons folksonomic systems have become so popular is ease of use and accessibility for users. Everyone can create own classification without special knowledge. Folksonomy represents direct reflection of user vocabulary. But that fact can be a drawback also,because different users have different vocabularies, therefore user created tags can be very specific.Again use of specific tags may be particularly useful for different social categories, e.g. students working on special project, researchers, different kinds of user communities, etc.	No synonym control There are no synonyms in folksonomic systems at all. Example: windows, vista, OS and Microsoft and not related tags.
Immediate feedback and communication After assigning object with a tag, user immediately sees how many other users mark this object with the same tag, what else is assigned with your tag, and how tags are cross-referenced.	Spaces and phrases are not allowed Web services that use folksonomies are working with single words only and don't allow spaces. It may cause troubles if the user wants to create a hierarchy,though use of slashes is allowed.

Conclusion

Another criticism and perhaps the main one is underlined by M. Guy and E. Tonkin ("Folksonomies. Tidying up Tags?"): "folksonomies are trying to serve two masters at once; the personal collection, and the collective collection". Some explorations show that folksonomies need further improvements, which make user tags more understandable to all social groups, allow synonym and homonym control. In other words they vote for improving quality of user tags and removing non-sense,redundant metadata. While some researchers face against tidying up tags, saying that uncontrolled user vocabulary is exactly the thing that makes folksonomies so popular nowadays.

Needed to say folksonomies are expected to improve and develop further,particularly in relation to how the tags can be used for search. A. Mathes ("Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata", 2004)emphasizes the following directions of further development:

• Quantitative tag analysis
  
• Quantitative user analysis
  
• Applicability to other systems
  

References

1. Thomas Vander Val Explaining and Showing Broad and Narrow Folksonomies
   
2. Guy,M. and Tonkin,E. Folksonomies. Tidying up Tags?
   
3. Adam Mathes Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata. University of Illinois
   
4. Wikipedia Folksonomy
   
5. Bison,S., Corns,I., Picas, C. The Library 2.0 Folksonomy Gang