First. Early this month under point #11 in my Content Findability: Good Practice post I said:

I reached the conclusion that my del.icio.us tags were out of control. After a few months of being a steady user I had accumulated 433 items and was using a flat structure without grouping. Nuts. I took the 15 minutes to create bundles for people, companies, organizations, places and software. Ah, so much better, and I next plan to create a concepts.

In this statement I mistakenly used this as an example of “Directories (hierarchical lists).” After now having read the excellent FaceTag presentation and paper from EuroIA 2006, I now come to understand ‘facet’ is what I was really doing and reaching for, contrast to a hierarchical ‘taxonomy’.

Second. In my Tagging and Taxonomy Exploration (Part-2) post last week I said (paraphrased to improve context)

I’d like to gain gain additional findability value by layering a more “top-down” existing authoritative taxonomy into either del.icio.us or LearningLinks to guide the vocabulary and structure to more the ’standard’.

This set me off to look for existing structures for organizing information related to workplace learning and development (the domain of interest.)

My first try was with the Open Directory Project (ODP), usefully described in this Wikipedia page. I hit the home page and quickly narrow to the ‘Business’ category. I then look for ‘Learning’, nothing (not surprising); then for ‘workforce, employee, etc. Development’, again nothing and again not surprising. So I am left with the forgivable ‘Education and Training’ category. It is here that things fall apart for me with this view:

Oh my, I’m now being pushed into thinking “training related to…” versus my mental model of “type of training” or “about training.” I do have a brief chuckle to myself as I mentally merge e-learning with the Aromatherapy category in ways not intended.

Pushing on, with some thought, I can get myself to ‘Human Resources’, click and get presented with the following that is at the individual site level without further categorization:

I rethink my approach and do a search on ‘Learning’, to be presented with the choose of going down an ‘Education’ branch or into a flat list of 10,000 sites:

I go for Education and pick ‘Learning Theories’ thinking this might take me into some instructional design content and I get presented with:

Close, but now I’m way deep into a particular branch that is not at all my view of the domain for workplace learning and development and performance improvement.

I like directories, just as long as they are MY directories organized to MY mental model…leading me to a new thought for another day: building a web page with my own mental model of my body of knowledge with each label being a link or links to various Search queries for that label. A new component to build for my Personal Learning Environment.

1. Freebase is in a different league than Fuzzzy relative to at least venture capital backing versus student project. From Fuzzzy’s About page…first, the cause for pause:
   

   The system is a research project and some parts of the system may be very experimental. We are continuously developing this system. If the project is terminated we will inform you some time before the service is shut down. In that case, export mechanisms will be developed so that you can move your data somewhere else.

   Next the cause for excitement:

   Fuzzzy is not only social but also semantic which means that the Tags used have more meaning. When bookmarks are assigned a meaning using a standard like the ISO 13250 Topic Map then people as well as other computer systems can make use of the embedded knowledge in a more meaningful way. This way of categorising content is a middle way between the top-down monolithic taxonomy approach like the Yahoo directory and the more recent social tagging (folksonomy) approaches.

2. I need to dig more into Topic Maps. I was only first introduced a few weeks back via this wild Alexander Johannesen – Sexier Smarter IA through Topic Maps podcast.
3. Indeed, I want portability for my tagging data. I know I can export my de.icio.us to bookmarks. But, can I change to a different tagging software (for example Furl, Ma.gnolia, Fuzzzy, etc.) and take my data with me from del.icio.us? Harold Jarche wrote in December about his experience from going from Furl to del.icio.us.
4. Prompted by this start of a deeper-dive, today I finally got around to creating accounts on Furl and Ma.gnolia and started to experiment to get a more hands-on comparison.
5. Add to the list FaceTag that I discovered today thanks to washtublibrarian. I am certainly drawn to their tagline, which echoes what the Fuzzzy About page said: “Integrating bottom-up and top-down classification in a social tagging system” as this is exactly what I am reaching for when I first was pointed to that made-up C-word I ranted on yesterday.
6. For some unknown reason in my adoption of del.icio.us for the last two months, I’ve been resisting tagging lower level pages such as individual blog posts — reserving this only for pages/posts that I really really wanted to be certain to find myself back to; for example, a ‘how to’ on a very narrow topic. I can’t explain my resistance rationally. I don’t know where I came up with the notion that I should do most my tagging for home pages. My thinking is now shifting and I am much more likely to tag a deep-link and I believe that is where the most potential value is. Okay, sometimes I’m just slow to get it.
7. Either connected to the previous, or alternative to? I want my general tagging software to be integrated with my feedreader. I am annoyed that I am managing my feedreader content through folder structure (yuck) and search only. Here I am reminded of what John Tropea described on his own wishlist over at Library clips.
8. de.icio.us does admit to performance issues in overdue new year’s resolutions.
9. Still to dig into, but looks very informative for this dive is Steve Eisner’s five post series on “Enterprise del.icio.us.” I also still need to get up to speed with My Yahoo!
10. Lastly, I’m feeling a bit foolish about yesterday being so quick to point to David Weinberger’s post versus doing my own research first. Alas, at the end of what felt like a very long work week, I fell into the lazy blogger behavior of pointing to somebody who is pointing to somebody who is pointing to somebody. Hopefully I have received at least some redemption with the above evidence of starting to do my real homework.

Photo Credit: Sean Bellew