It’s potential thesis juice so I thought I’d scribble down what’s in my head around the subject.

Folksonomy is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content.

wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy

It captured my imagination because I recently labelled the entire contents of my Gmail inbox (groan) and I struggled to define a useful naming approach. I’d have liked to have been able to select some off-the-shelf labels to get me started.

Either way, my labels are forever in ‘beta’ and there will be plenty more hours spent re-labelling everything when I come up with a new genius way of managing my mail (delete button is probably the best option).

‘Folksonomic’ doesn’t quite describe what I’m interested in however (which is a shame cos ‘folksonomic interface development’ sounds really good!).

What I’m interested in is the notion that users of software might be able to alter the user interface and then share their changes with a community. The key word here is ‘users’. I’m not describing open-source development by software creators.

Imagine if in your favourite piece of software you can re-arrange functions and buttons. You can add and remove functionality. You can skin the interface to make it look pretty. Then you can publish your version of the UI for others to use.

That’s about it for now. Most of that thinking was done on the 159 bus on the way to work this morning. There is much more to be done.

Frustratingly, I can’t see a way to embed it into this post…

jenny-bee.net/2008/04/22/buzzdaq/

Hi Jenny

Thanks for looking at our Buzzdaq, it was a great idea to add an embed code. If you take a look now, you’ll notice we’ve added one one on there now!

jenny-bee.net/2008/04/22/buzzdaq/#comment-131

Nice one Refreshed Media.

Refreshed Media unveil their latest digital breakthrough called Buzzdaq, which … allows visitors to see, at a glance the most mentioned words from hundreds of specially selected blog and news articles.

All feeds are taken from the blogs or news items of sites relevant to the internet community… These are drawn from an RSS feed and displayed through the Buzzdaq application which can then be bookmarked to share with others.

From socialmediaportal.com

Frustratingly, I can’t see a way to embed it into this post, but you can sample the delights of Buzzdaq on the Internet World website.

I’m wondering whether something like this could be used to measure the buzz around specific conferences (related post: I want it ALL (in one place)!).

We used to play color wars at summer camp. Near the end of the year the entire camp would split up into colors, red, green, black, blue, etc… and compete in a series of events: tug of war, egg toss, basketball…

zeFrank

I LOVE the idea of playing games on twitter.

So I started a thread using the concept of chain stories which I think would work really well within the 140-character medium.

Here’s how it went (read bottom to top):

Some immediate issues surfaced:

1. There has to be mutual follow-ship between the participants (the penultimate post on the above screenshot was tweeted by someone I wasn’t following and I didn’t see it at the time it was posted)
2. Simultaneous posting from more than one participant (is likely and it…) breaks the thread (if facilitated by @replies)
3. Likewise, delayed posting also breaks the thread
4. It’s just generally difficult to follow the thread of the story

Possible solutions:

1. Limit the game to two participants
2. Set up a group and have people tweet to that somehow (this wouldn’t totally solve the simultaneous posting problem)
3. Let the game descend into anarchy from time to time – use hashtags to follow the story rather than @replies

I’m inclined to take the latter approach. As long as an individual is monitoring the thread they could draw everything back together if tweets got out of control. Alternatively, the story could be allowed to branch off by changing the hashtag (#story, #story1, #story2 etc).

Ultimately for a game like this to work, it has to be spontaneous and simple. I’ll give it another try at some point and document it here.

Some other game ideas:

• Word of the day: challenge people to include a specified (really obscure) word in their tweets
• Web treasure hunt: clues build up a picture and participants have to identify a digital artifact and link to it
• Degrees of separation: get from one person/thing/place etc to another in as few ‘degrees’ as possible
• I’m NOT going to suggest Mornington Crescent as that would be far to geeky

Tag Clouds. Huh. What are they good for? Absolutely nothing.

@spxdcz

Tag clouds have suffered from designers/developers over-enthusiastic adoption of web 2.0 tricks. But when they are used appropriately they can be an intuitive and fun navigation method.

iStockPhoto
flickr.com/photos/tags

But why don’t they use tag clouds on this site?

I’ll add more examples and assign star ratings as and when I come across them.