I’m having another of parallel universe feeling. Unknown to me as I was writing my earlier post today regarding some desired evolution of tagging and collaborative directory approaches, David Wienberger also today blogged Gather ye metadata while ye can – via Fuzzzy and Freebase highlighting two new entries to the crowded tagging field.
Regarding Fuzzzy, David says:
[Fuzzzy] lets you tag bookmarks and maintain a social network. The big words come in because Fuzzzy lets you position a tag in an ontology…I’m interested to see how this experiment works out. There’s no question that the metadata it collects — in addition to classifying the resource according to a taxonomy, the site lets you check some boxes to indicate the resource’s “mood,” knowledge type, and details level — would be useful, but experience teaches us — until it confounds all teachings — that people generally resist attaching explicit metadata.
From the Fuzzzy registration page:
You will be able to vote on content, find other users with similar interests, and get personalised views and much more.
Sounds good and fills in some of the missing from del.icio.us for me that I mentioned earlier today.
As I start to use Fuzzzy I’m not so sure about their Mood (Fact, Fun, or Compassion), Knowledge Type (Why and If, How, What Where Who and When), and Details Level (Overview, Detailed) classification schema. It will be interesting how will it works for me over time. Compared to del.icio.us, I do prefer their user interface.
Regarding Freebase, David says:
Freebase will be fascinating to watch. If we do in fact build it, we’ll have a publicly accessible (Creative Commons licensed) ontology populated with tons of stuff we care about that will do much of what the Semantic Web is trying to do: Draw implicit connections, discover context, search better, and just in general be smarter users of a smarter Web.
I submitted my email address to get on the list for an invitation. Stay tuned.