Nick Vidal

The tagcloud element exposes data to be used for creating visualizations. We are brainstorming about different types of data that could be used. One of them is the “syndicated” type, which details how many entries have been syndicated in a given month. For example, 43 entries tagged “science” were syndicated in January 2008.

<tag name=”science”>
<tagcloud type=”syndicated” year=”2006|2007|2008”
data=”0,0,0,0,0,0,4,23,45,32,34,31|
32,44,53,23,43,32,34,64,34,21,35,23|
43,23,34″/>
</tag>

By comparing the data for this tag with the data from the other tags, it’s possible to build a tagcloud to reveal what were the most syndicated tags in January 2008.

So far, we have the following types:

• Syndicated: number of entries syndicated;
• Authored: number of entries authored;
• Subscribed: number of subscribers;
• Commented: number of comments (from personal social network);
• Shared: number of entries shared (from personal social network).

We are open for feedback. Thanks!

I’ve received some feedback from old time contributor Massimiliano Mirra and our latest contributor Richard Hilliard, about the tagcloud and taglink formats. We decided to:

• merge tagcloud and taglink into one, and
• create the tagcloud and taglink elements.

This is how it would look:
<iss>
…
<tag name=”science”>
<tagcloud type=”syndicated” year=”2006|2007|2008″
data=”0,0,0,0,0,0,4,23,45,32,34,31|
32,44,53,23,43,32,34,64,34,21,35,23|
43,23,34″/>
<taglink type=”base”
push=”xmpp:nick@iss.im?;node=science”
pull=”http://nick.iss.im/category/science”/>
<taglink type=”incoming”
push=”xmpp:debbie@iss.im?;node=environment”
pull=”http://debbie.iss.im/category/environment”/>
…
<taglink type=”outgoing”
push=”xmpp:penny@iss.im?;node=science”
pull=”http://penny.iss.im/category/science”/>
…
</tag>
…
</iss>

We believe now it’s more compact, clean, and easier to generate and process. Any feedback is welcome. Thanks!

ISS was designed with one interesting characteristic in mind: incoming information only comes from one-degree apart friends through subscriptions. This characteristic provides an architecture which is 100% guaranteed to be SPAM free. You’ll only receive information you want. And if you start receiving information you don’t want, you can either directly contact your friend and talk to him/her about it, or simply unsubscribe from him/her. It’s interesting to observe that the cascading of trustful social networks works as a world wide distributed recommender system perfectly tuned to output a very personalized stream. This trustful network filters out irrelevant information, while still letting good information pass through. Your friends work for you, and their friends work for them, and so forth. Everyone works together to recommend and filter information. ISS effectively unleashes the great deal of untapped potential of the collective intelligence to organize information.

The guys from the Decentralized Information Group at MIT have been pondering about this idea of combating SPAM using social networks. They implemented a FOAF crawler that generates a social graph periodically. And from this social graph they create policies around it, such as, for example, only people x-degrees apart can comment on the blog.

This goes very much aligned with how ISS was designed. When a user receives an entry from a  friend, she can read the comments that her personal network has made about it. She may also download the attached files directly from her personal network, making it easier on the original author’s server in case the entry gets popular. And since the information that reaches the user always leaves a trace, it’s very well possible to choose, for example, to read only the comments for a particular entry from people x-degrees apart.

I updated the ISS policies to make it clear how ISS controls the quality of information that reaches the user. I’ve added a special case, which are friendship requests, since these requests obviously will come from people who are more than 1-degree apart. The funny thing is that eventually we’ll only add friends that are already on our list (not our personal network obviously, but our more wide social graph that was generated beforehand). Friendship requests from people more than x-degrees apart will be dropped, not because of despise, but simply because of trust. The requests that pass through this policy will be displayed to the user as a special channel, where the user can easily see the person’s tagcloud, how many degrees separate them and how much they are connected. He may add this person to his personal social network if he sees it appropriate.

These policies will initially be applied to the Web and I.M., but they’ll be applied to e-mail as well. These three means of communication will eventually converge and have a common interface. We will finally overcome SPAM and information overload, and reach an equilibrium of information-sharing and awareness.

For some background on how ISS (Instant Syndicating Standards) was born, I recommend reading my thesis. I also recommend going through the references.

ISS addresses the information-sharing problem. To come up with a solution, I was mostly influenced by these 6 technologies:

• Peer-to-peer Networks
• Social Networks
• Instant Messaging
• Blogging
• Social Tagging
• Content Syndication

ISS integrates these technologies in a seamless framework and finds the perfect balance:

• Peer-to-peer Networks: Centralized and Decentralized Networks
• Social Networks: Anonymous and Trusted Relationships
• Instant Messaging: Asynchronous and Synchronous Communication
• Blogging: Open and Structured Knowledge Management
• Social Tagging: Expert and User Metadata Creation
• Content Syndication: Pull and Push Technology

Creating the TagLink format was like solving a puzzle. In the end, everything must fit perfectly together. These are some important considerations that were taken to create the TagLink format:

• The channels are chained both ways: incoming and outgoing links. What I’m watching today, I’ll be syndicating tomorrow. A channel is a connection point. It’s to what users will tune in when they want to view information, and it’s to where users will broadcast out when they want to share information.
• For users to share information, they don’t have necessarily to share the same concepts. All they have to do is to show how their friends’ concepts are associated with their own concepts. This is the essence of TagLink.
• The TagLink will evolve dynamically. It’s part of the Discover/Subscribe pattern. You discover an interesting channel, you subscribe to it, and your TagLink gets updated. A friend discovers an interesting channel from you, he subscribes to it, and your TagLink gets updated too.
• The TagLink helps define the color of the tags in the TagCloud. Blue for incoming flow of information, red for outgoing flow, purple for a mutual flow and black for no flow.

The TagCloud format was very much inspired by the social tagging phenomenon. Social Tagging is a bottom-up approach to cataloging information. Traditional cataloging of information is done by experts using taxonomies or ontologies in a top-down fashion. Social tagging, on the other hand, is done by common people. People are free to choose any set of keywords that they see fit to describe a specific information.

Social tagging has being very successful for organizing information. They are used for organizing e-mail (e.g. Gmail), bookmarks (e.g. Del.icio.us), photos (e.g. Flickr), music (e.g. LastFM), video (e.g. YouTube), blog entries (e.g WordPress), and reference entries (e.g Wikipedia).

In the context of ISS, tags are used to identify channels. These are some important considerations that were taken to create the TagCloud format:

• People will have a limited amount of channels in any given time-frame. It helps friends become aware of their interests, and it helps them become self-aware of their own interests. Users that just tag anything that they read have huge tag clouds that tells me very little about them.
• The time-frame is very important. The TagCloud format allows me to answer the following question: what are my friends’ current interests? Compare that to APML (Attention Profiling Mark-up Language). People’s interests shift or evolve.
• A TagCloud is something to which friends will want to subscribe to. This is essential to keep friends aware of new information in a non-obtrusive way. It’s the core idea behind ISS.