[Tagdb] TagCamp 2005 trip report

[Nitin Borwankar]

Tags: tagcamp tripreport

Starting with an email that went out to some 5 of us mid September, 
TagCamp slowly mushroomed into something that was way beyond 
expectations in quality and quantity.
Approx 100 people were registered on the wiki ( http://tagcamp.org ) and 
many more turned up unannounced.  Apparently this was much more than at 
Bar Camp which was held at the same location.  TagCamp differed from all 
the other XYZCamps in that it was focused on  a single topic and brought 
out practitioners from non technical and technical disciplines all 
working on some aspect of tagging and folksonomy. ( Are we in a Camp 
Bubble - or is this Camp 2.0 )

Some areas covered - notice the wide variety of subjects with a common 
focus -

* Why do people tag - motivations for individual, group and public tagging
* Tag metadata in filesystems
* Tag spaces - how to reconcile different emanings of tags in different 
domains
* Tag ontology - can we create an abstract model of tags and tagging 
that will allow AI like operations to be done on tagged data
* Tag schema - what are the ways in which highly scalable tag systems 
can be built with existing and future databases
* Tag markup -  Microformats for embedding tag metadata in markup ( 
rel=tag microformat ) so Technorati and others can spider
* Search in the world of tagging
* Lexical analysis of language for tagging
* Tag-based applications -  cocoalicious, Flock, Kaboodle, Wink, Ojos ( 
now Riya ) ....
* Cognitive load of tagging

+ the usual smattering of Web 2.0 VC's, analysts and bloggers - Michael 
Arrington of TechCrunch, Steve Gillmore, Ross Mayfield, Stowe Boyd , 
danah boyd ( no relation),   Biz Stone,  Dave Winer, ....

One major take away was from a talk that was being given by a professor 
from U of BC Vancouver ( Lee Iverson ),  he was mentioning the  
important factors  that made a  group  application successful and it  
applies to folksonomy apps as well.  The top one is "work vs benefit".  
How much work does the user have to do and what is the benfit to the 
user - most past groupware applications failed because the user was 
supposed to do a lot of the work  so  that the  group  would benefit,  
but there was little or no benefit for the user so this kind of model is 
unsustainable.  To be successful an app must give the user benefit with 
minimum work and the group benefit should just fall out of that for 
free.   Del and to some extent Flickr seem to fit into that model. 

Two major concrete outcomes -

a) a  meme - tag your email on the first line with Tags:  .....  pass it on
   in future this helps search email on list archives far better than 
using the subject line or even your inbox in future when Tag search is 
available. This kind of tag tags content as the sender intended it to be 
tagged.  GMail tags it as the recipient wants to tag it - these are 
complementary and different - you may tag this email -"reference" or 
"trash" which is your view of the
same data.  Start tagging email and make it more useful to the receiver.

b) a collaborative effort called "tagomatic"  to create a set of  
standard API's, data models and conventions so that tags can 
interoperate between different applications

An especially satisfying part was the one where a number of list members 
came up and introduced themselves - great putting faces to names.
All in all a very fulfilling 24 hours. 

Strongly recommend watching http://tagcamp.org for further developments

Nitin Borwankar