My Tagging Experiment

A little tongue in cheek this one. This years Dconstruct07 utilized a pre-conference website at Backnetwork. I tried a little to make connections here but my personal network consisted of just two work colleagues. My attempt to discover mutual interests amongst the attendees, via a couple of forum posts only resulted in one response which being just before the conference I did not read until afterwards (doh).

It seems a little over half the attendees signed up to the site on backnetwork and although I didn't make any new connections there, there was some useful insider information posted. In some other arenas I would guess that the sign up would be lower but this type of pre-conference interaction is perhaps something that more and more people are going to come to expect.

At one point the evening before, my mind was bored and thinking of hand-held devices, I was also thinking of tagging and whether I had put up the right 'interests' on the Backnetwork site. Tomorrow I would presumably be spending sometime in a large crowd of total strangers and have no idea or way to discriminate those that shared similar interests (or complimentary interests). I flashed forward to the future and imagined a hand-held device that was not only wireless but also transmitted a configurable profile. The profile would contain information on my current interests and status. For example if I really was looking to chat and had free time it would indicate this (like the 'Skype me' option on Skype). Pull out the device and it would communicate with all the other devices in the crowd, I could pop-up a screen and scroll though options highlighting the position of other people of interest and their position.

There is of course scope for chaos, how long before some wag transmits "I am a 10 second bomb", "I am a 9 second bomb" "I am .....". Or rue the day a Supermodel wanders into the conference transmitting "Computer geeks make me hot, and I love Apple technology" (there would be deaths, I am sure of it). Is this a nightmare vision, something desirable or just something soon inevitable?

I had no such device so resorted to writing, "I study Chinese" in Chinese characters in the space below my name on the name badge. As expected this was entirely unsuccessful but never mind I had plenty of opportunity to chat with the Chinese community in Brighton during non-conference time.

Oh yes, later in the day Tom Coates introduced us to a feature world (not too distant) where the absolute position of everybody could be plotted and reported and Paul Boag in one of his podcasts in talking about the IPhone speculated on all shops and venues transmitting information that could be picked up as you wander by. Not a big leap to extend this to people and already happening in a limited way via Bluetooth.

A Web of Data

Returning to the presentation made by Tom Coates, in my last post I extracted the "Your website is not your product" idea as that struck a particularly resonant chord. But there were plenty more ideas.

On the subject of meta data, Tom seemed to be in favor of retaining as much as possible (particularly if available for free as part of an automated process). You cannot easily second guess how your users will search and sift through your data, using Flickr as an example it was demonstrated just how many different ways that the photos can be sorted, obvious ones by user or tag and less obvious by Camera make/type and various camera settings when the photo was taken.

Tom also highlighted the idiocy of the taxonomy vs folksonomy arguments. Both have advantages so why not provide both, why not throw in parametric searching and anything else as well? This kind of reminds me of the way that small children absorb certain concepts. Ask them do you want X or icecream and they will see this as a choice that has to made. Once a certain age is reached and their mental processing of concepts they are familiar with improves they will think for a second and ask "errr can I have X and icecream please?".

This boagworld.com podcast talks briefly about Dconstruct07 in the news section towards the beginning (also has good things to say about Tom's presentation. Listening to this reminded me of a couple of things that I had forgotten or not noted, I think when they appear the podcasts of the Dconstruct07 will prove very useful for review. For now I have put the feed for the Dconstruct07 podcasts in the left column of this blog, but so far it only contains three pre-conference podcasts. Incidentally as a developer who is also interested in the front-end and user experiance I find the boagworld podcasts very helpful.