The Pew survey (blogged here) that says 28% of respondents have tagged or categorized content is startling. And 7% said they had tagged or categorized something that very day. Wow.

Pew does good work, but let’s say the number is off way beyond the margin of error. Say it’s off by 50%. Or 75%. Or 90%. I don’t believe it’s anywhere near that wrong, but even if it were, that’s still about 3% of US Internet users creating tags. How many taggers do we need for tags to become a vital resource for the entire Web and all its denizens?

Even if just 1% of Web users tagged resources with some regularity, they would be creating handholds for the other 99%. That 1% will add a layer of meaning (or “semantics,” if you prefer the way that sounds) that will seed enough innovation and connectedness of ideas—and thus of people—that we’ll have to go straight from Web 2.0 to Web 4.0. (Web 3.0 is about the Web getting “lemony-scented,” so it’s just as well that we’re skipping it.) [Tags: tagging pew everything_is_miscellaneous web2.0 ]

The Pew survey (blogged here) that says 28% of respondents have tagged or categorized content is startling. And 7% said they had tagged or categorized something that very day. Wow.

Pew does good work, but let’s say the number is off way beyond the margin of error. Say it’s off by 50%. Or 75%. Or 90%. I don’t believe it’s anywhere near that wrong, but even if it were, that’s still about 3% of US Internet users creating tags. How many taggers do we need for tags to become a vital resource for the entire Web and all its denizens?

Even if just 1% of Web users tagged resources with some regularity, they would be creating handholds for the other 99%. That 1% will add a layer of meaning (or “semantics,” if you prefer the way that sounds) that will seed enough innovation and connectedness of ideas—and thus of people—that we’ll have to go straight from Web 2.0 to Web 4.0. (Web 3.0 is about the Web getting “lemony-scented,” so it’s just as well that we’re skipping it.) [Tags: tagging pew everything_is_miscellaneous web2.0 ]

Brad DeLong observes “some of the more interesting categories from Crooked Timber“… [Tags: tagging taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous humor ]

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has just released a report by Lee Rainie that finds:

28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorize online content.

Since the last figure I saw (and of course I don’t remember where I saw it) was that 0.5% of Net users have used tags, this is a spectacular finding. The wording of the question was “”Please tell me if you ever use the internet to categorize or tag online content like a photo, news story, or a blog post,” so it includes more than people who have set up an account at del.icio.us and are hard-core taggers. Still, it’s a spectacular finding.

Lee generously includes in the report an interview with me about tagging. Thanks, Lee! [Tags: tagging pew lee_rainie everything_is_miscellaneous folksonomy taxonomy]

Andrew McAfee and Karim Lakhani at Harvard Business School has published the first HBS case study of Wikipedia. I haven’t read it yet, but the questions and topics look very interesting… [Tags: wikipedia hbs everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Mochila says it’s doing for all content what iTunes has done for music: Enabling people to buy the content they need when they need it. It has a marketplace to let you monetize your “high quality” content. You can set rules for embargoes and usage [=DRM]. From the annoying promotional video he shows, it seems to be aimed at big time publishers, e.g., Redbook, Popular Mechanics and Enterpreneur. “Mochila has solved a huge problem in the media market: Licensing doesn’t scale…We make licensing safe and scalable.”

ThisNext helps you do social shopping. There are 60M SKUs. People want to help each other decide what to buy. At ThisNext users can talk about the products they care about. “McKinsey reports 27% of all personal conversations in USA include discussions of products.” Only 15% of us trust advertisers. “Social shopping is the future of online marketing and brand merchandising.” ThisNext tries to attract the “influencers.” You can see who’s making the recommendation and can connect one-to-one. [Did I ever tell you about the time a couple of friends and I started a company called WordOfMouth.com to enable local communities recommend local services? Someday someone will get online word of mouth right.]

[Tags: onmedia07 alwayson marketing media drm everything_is_miscellaneous ]

ClickForensics has launched a network of advertisers to detect fraudulent clicks on ads, either by a competitor trying to burn up the budget or move up in listings, or by contentent publishers looking to make more money for the clicks. It’s done through bots, spyware, click farms, pay-to-read… They say over 20% of the clicks coming from content sites (?) are fraudulent.

Michelle Wu of Social Television (mediaZone) — omigod, I think it’s a woman! — talks about “social tv,” which is professional TV with social interactivity. She’s shows an over-produced promotional video, with the faux-important voice of Robin Leech. Then she pitches. It lets users talk together—chat—while watching professional packaged, long-form TV. It does p2p peering, saving “over 99% bandwidth costs.” It serves ads to users based on their demographics and behavior. [I’m just not convinced that these various platforms we’ve seen today do much more than starting up a chat room while watching TV; that’s what we do for political events we couldn’t otherwise stand to watch.The P2P delivery is interesting, but I’m guessing someone else will solve this problem in a way that catches on, at which point SocialTV doesn’t seem to be much more than a chatroom with ads. Unless I’m missing the point. Again.]

Dave Networks builds “video social communities around brands.” E.g., the Stargate site is a money-making community site.The content developed there can be syndicated. “We’ve created a monetization model for syndication.”

Real Time Content promises a “disruptive approach” that they call Adaptive Media. “Real Time Content, doesn’t just play media, it adapts it to the audience.” Every viewer sees his own TV program. [Well, ad.] It even adapts to the viewer’s mood. In his example, Honda FR-V has four user profiles, although you could have thousands. He creates a thirty second ad in real time for a “young married couple” profile. Then he does one for a socer mom. The first is in Scotland with soothing music and the second features a mom packing kid’s equipment, with spacey music and a voice-over. “We’re empowering the consumer to control the ad.” The ad creator creates the template using a Flash inteface that has metadata for content fragments for mood, demo, etc. [Great. Now we can wait for the blog post titled “My Adaptive Media ads think I’m gay.”]

Jay Hallberg of SpiceWorks does “Ad-supported IT management for SMBs.” If you subscribe, it inventories your network automatically and sets watches on things you want to watch, such as low disk space or low toner. As they do that, they show you ads. [Hmm. Could I be sick of seeing ads? Nah. How could I ever tire of that??] [SpiceWorks may do more than that, but I didn’t hear.] [Tags: onmedia07 alwayson marketing advertising metadata everything_is_miscellaneous ]

RageBoy stumbled on Amazon’s Amapedia, a wiki for the products you like. It uses what Amazon is calling “collaborative structured tagging.” Click on, say, “cameras” in the tag cloud and you can walk through a camera hierarchy until you get to a particular model. There you can do a product write-up or record your opinion, personal experiences, etc.

Siderean, a faceted classification company, has announced a patent for what it calls “relational navigation.”

Faceted classification lets a user browse a field in typical hierarchical fashion—like navigating through the nested folders on your desktop—except the hierarchy is created dynamically as the user decides which property matters to her now. So, instead of having a fixed taxonomy that first divides all books into fiction and non-fiction, and then subdivides them by language and then by year, with a faceted classification, a user might decide first to find all the works written in the 19th century, then drill down to the non-fiction, etc. It has taxonomy’s virtue of guiding navigation without its vice of having to present the user with one and only one path through the taxonomy.

Faceted classification and taxonomies both work by showing the user narrower and narrower results . That’s often what we want, but in this crazy world, we may also want to leap off the branch we’ve walked onto. Siderean’s relational nav shows context from branches outside of the path you’ve walked. Siderean refers to this as the ability to “pivot,” as in a database pivot.

Techniques that let us play with the dialectic between narrowing our focus and expanding it—searching and discovering—are all to the good. The faceted classification industry overall is up to important and exciting stuff. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy faceted_classification facets siderean ]

MetaGlossary is a definition aggregator that scrapes online glossaries and other sources. It’s got about 2,000,000 English words and phrases, and is particular useful when the words are new or you’re looking for a phrase. (Try “truthiness,” “alternative fuels“, “mission accomplished,” or “miserable failure.”)

Until today it’s been algorithmically driven. The new version of the beta lets anyone suggest a new or improved definition. You can also give a thumbs up or down to an existing definition.

It’s a good start. It’ll be fascinating to see what other social structures emerge. E.g., do we need to be able to edit existing definitions? A way to indicate that two definitions are good but need to be forked? More of a reputation system? It’ll be fun to watch this site… [Tags: metaglossary wikis dictionaries web2.0 everything_is_miscellaneous ]