The tags will appear on the "photo" tag on the Facebook Page, not on the walls and can be tagged by anyone on Facebook, not just people who have liked that page. For the start of the feature, only Facebook Pages with the "brands & products" or "people" categories can be tagged in photos. Facebook will look to expand that to more page categories over time.

This seems like a smart play by Facebook as it tries to become a stronger destination for companies and brands online. Marketers could focus viral ad campaigns around photo tagging like "show us the weirdest place you ever drank a Pepsi and win a trip to Bonnaroo" or something of that nature.

Are you going to start tagging brands in your Facebook photos? Let us know in the comments.

Face Tagging literally works exactly like tagging photos on Facebook. While viewing a picture, the text "In this photo:" is displayed below it with a link to begin tagging the photo. By clicking the link, users can then pinpoint people's faces in the photo and a box will appear around the face, as well as a pop-up dialogue box in which to enter the person's name and Twitter handle. Once done, users hit the "Done Tagging" button to return to normal browsing functionality - just like Facebook.

Honestly, the only difference between tagging photos on Facebook and on Twitpic is that the "Done Tagging" button appears above photos on the former and below photos on the latter. While Twitpic's new functionality is a dead lift of Facebook's long-existing photo tagging feature, it is smart to copy the social networking giant. Why re-invent the wheel? Instead, Twitpic is giving users a familiar experience, making the process easy and intuitive.

How It Doesn't Work

When users tag a face in a photo, by default they can send a rather dry tweet announcing the tag and including the user name of the person tagged, effectively working as a notification. First of all, the inability to personalize this message is a bit of a downer, but you can always just uncheck the box and send out the tweet yourself.

Additionally, the only way Twitpic alerts users that they have been tagged in a photo is via Twitter - so users could be tagged in hundreds of photos and not know it if the tagger chose not to tweet the tags. Users do have the ability to delete tags of themselves on other people's photos, but right now the only way of knowing of such photos is to be sent the tweet, which not everyone will choose to do.

In a phone interview today, Twitpic founder Noah Everett told ReadWriteWeb that additional features, like the ability to view photos you're tagged in, are in the works and should be out in a few weeks. The goal, he says, has been to launch the tagging feature and use user feedback to determine the next logical step.

What About Privacy?

That next logical step, for many users, may be privacy controls - something the new feature lacks. On Facebook, users have the ability to manage photos they have been tagged in and remove their association from a photo once-and-for-all. The only option related to photo tags for Twitpic users is the option to allow other people to tag their photos. Everett says Twitpic is looking into possible privacy controls, such as a blanket rule preventing anyone from tagging you, or specific user-based bans to avoid those "crazy ex-girlfriends", as he put it.

Personally, I use Twitpic mainly as a means to an end - I upload photos to the service for sharing on Twitter via a mobile application, which means I don't visit the Twitpic web interface too frequently. How am I supposed to know when I'm tagged in a photo if the user tagging me chooses not to tweet it? Even if I visit the Twitpic homepage, there is no way for me to view an aggregated list of photos I am tagged in and no system for notifying me of such photos.

Everett says the company is considering ways to notify users, including email alterts, but hopes that eventually app developers will add the functionality using Twitpic's API. I guess the good thing is if someone decides to surreptitiously tag me in a photo, for now the general public has no real great way of finding it either.

An Impending Headache for Data Fans?

The other important thing to note from the launch of Twitpic's Face Tagging functionality is that it is a new stand-alone platform on a third-party Twitter application. What that means is that compatibility between networks is completely up to Twitpic. When other Twitter-based photo sharing apps add this functionality (which they are likely to do), it will be nearly impossible for users to effectively aggregate their tagged photos (and other meta-data) across platforms.

I spoke with Thomas Vander Wal, father of the phrase "folksonomy" which refers to collective tagging of meta-data, and he shared some interesting insights into this situation.

"Since others have done similar things on other platforms (Facebook, Flickr) the [intellectual property] is fuzzy and Twitpic can't claim it, so others are free to jump in," Vander Wal told ReadWriteWeb. "It would be in Twitter's best interest to build a central aggregation point for this."

This is exactly why Twitter is rolling out annotations, which have been testing recently and should be out soon. The annotations will create a standardized framework for third-party apps to build from, making interoperability between services much easier. Everett said he actually spoke with people from Twitter today about "coming together" and "rolling [tagging functionality] into annotations."

Strangely, however, Twitter mentioned in April that it planned on having "trending annotations" and letting developers battle for standardization. It would make sense that meta-data for tagged photos could be added to Twitter's annotations, and if the services adopted the standard, aggregation would be simple.

If not, then the entrepreneurial community, "somebody like PixelPipe" as Vander Wal suggested, would need to create another third-party Twitter service that would handle this aggregation - not an ideal solution going forward. We can't blame Twitpic for this fate: what the company is doing is good in terms of pushing the platform forward. We can, however, bring up the privacy issues Twitpic has raised with their new service and its apparent lack of controls, but then again, it is a brand new feature and more functionality is on the way soon.

But nested labels is a somewhat curious addition. It turns Gmail's once-revolutionary "tagging" system into something that more closely resembles the traditional folder structure found in email programs like Outlook. So now you can drag-and-drop your email into these so-called labels and you can create hierarchies, too? Oh, c'mon, Gmail, let's just call them folders already and be done with it.

Wait! Before you rush into the comments and declare your love for nested folders, the option you've been waiting for since the day you got your Gmail invite back in 2004, hear me out.

I get it - nested folders are great. I'll probably even use them. (I am nothing, if not a Gmail filter junkie. Nearly everything get tagged upon arrival and a lot gets pre-filed, too).

The point is that these labels were introduced as a major improvement over folders because you could - Wow! - tag email messages with more than one label. That means mail could be tagged "Travel," "Coupons" and "Southwest Airlines" all at once. And wasn't that just amazing?

But the problem with Gmail's tagging system is that there's no easy way to surface the combination of these tags. For example, what if you want to see all mail tagged "Work," "From Boss" and "Project X?" Quick! How do you do it? (And don't tell me to type in some long, complex search query with colons and Boolean operators, either. Tell me how the average email user would do it). The answer? Most people don't know how. They're just going to enter a few search terms into the "search mail" box at the top of the screen. Or maybe they'll head over to the "From Boss" folder and then search for "Project X."

Missed Opportunity

Sadly, it seems that Gmail really missed an opportunity to take labels to the next level. For example: why can't there be an easy-to-use function somewhere at the top of the inbox to filter your mail by labels? Why isn't there an email intelligence system that learns how you label your mail and then starts auto-tagging it for you? Why can't Gmail figure out that if a particular message matches a filter you designed to label your incoming mail that means the message is not spam? 

No, instead of integrating a sense of intelligence into its filtering mechanisms - efforts that seem well within Google's capabilities - Gmail's labels are turning back into the ever-so-innovative folders they were meant to replace.

That's fine, I guess. I never really thought folders were that bad - it was filtering that needed an overhaul. (Have you used filters in Outlook? Gmail's are much easier.) But let's call a spade, a spade. Sure, you can label an email with 10 different tags if you want, but don't expect to find it later via some sort of advanced filtered search. Gmail's labels are folders. And tags, god bless 'em, are dead. 

"In Flowdock, the epiphany comes when you tag a chat message for the first time," Nodeta and Flowdock's CTO Otta Hilska wrote us. "You realize how you just took a piece of conversation and turned it into a nugget of knowledge. Somebody talked about a bug, and you turned it into a bug report. Or pasted a snippet of code, and you categorized and organized it. The real validation for the concept comes when you are looking for some other snippet of code, a link to a partner, an eBook or something else and come to think 'I wonder if it's tagged in Flowdock". Sure enough it will be.'"

Designed for groups, Flowdock attempts to address a new kind of information overload, the one that intensified when social media tools began to be adopted by exponentially more people. The theory is that by tagging bits of the conversation, they are made discreet and retrievable based on folksonomy.

Use examples include agile development and handling to-dos.

Flowdock is out of private data and you the public is invited to try it.

This is where the book review come in. Every publicist and publisher's dream is to land a positive review with an authoritative source. A good review in The New York Times or the L.A. Times used to be a pass to big figure sales. Sounds like it still should be, but it is not, because most book reviews are poorly formatted and cannot be recognized by Google and other software.

Lets take a look at this edgy review of the Manhood, by the L.A. Times. It is a pure joy to read - it is elegant, clever and gets to the heart of the issue. There is only one problem with it - nobody is going to read it, because Google can't find it.

Try running this very specific Google search - "Manhood" by Mels van Driel review - and you will not find the L.A. Times among the results - at least not within first three pages that humans would care to flip through. How come might you ask? Well the answer is simple - there is nothing whatsoever that tells Google that this post is a book review about this particular book.

And this is not just an isolated problem with this book review from this particular newspaper. The issue is widespread across all major U.S. and international media outlets. Either due to lack of tools or lack of understanding how search engines and other software works, people notoriously don't make their content discoverable.

A Simple Way to Please Google

So how should be the book reviews tagged?

To start with, the title needs to make it clear, that this is a book review. Of course humans may find a more subtle title more enticing, but for the sake of machine: Book Review: Manhood by Mels has to be present. It would be even better to mark up that this is a book review, and here is the book title and here is the author.

Next, the post needs to be adorned with the right tags and keywords. L.A. Times' reviews are certainly very clever, but again, Google does not get humor. A better tag would the title of the book, the name of the author and the non-conspicuous phrase "book review".

A Better Way to Please Google and Tim Berners-Lee

The tagging system described above is still error prone. A computer might not interpret it correctly and would miss this post in the search results. This is because that kind of description is not structured. Humans enjoy a wonderful ability to deal with fuzzy things; computers simply can't do it.

For a computer to understand content, it needs to be described using a markup language. This is a broad and complex topic that has been a focus of the so-called Semantic Web and structured data.

The right way of marking up content so that it can be understood by Google, other search engines and semantic technologies is by using a structured format such as ePub, hReview Microformat, abmeta or one of the other structured formats. Using a structured format removes the ambiguity and enables computer to "know" what the review is about.

Making the content discoverable by Google in turn makes it discoverable by humans.

Tagging: It's All About the Money

Could it just be that book reviewers in major newspapers would get more page views if they did a better job tagging content? And then in turn, could it also be that if more people discovered clever and elegant reviews then more books would be sold? Even if you don't think so, there is way too much risk of getting this one wrong.

Doing appropriate, standard tagging and markup of book reviews is cheap and simple and should be part of the daily publishing routine. Each media company needs to invest in standards and guidelines around content markup. This is not just a matter of being good citizen of the Web, it is a matter of making money.

Photo credit: Ivan Petrov]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_google_and_other_humans_dont_read_your_book_reviews.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_google_and_other_humans_dont_read_your_book_reviews.php Semantic Web Sun, 14 Feb 2010 18:00:00 -0800 Alex Iskold Facebook just launched status tagging for friends, pages, events and groups. The company has torn a page out of the Twitter playbook and plans to increase search functionality via the @ tag. Over the next few weeks Facebook users will be able to tag their friends, pages and groups in status messages. Similar to photo tagging, all those indicated in the tag will receive a notification. Said Facebook product manager Andrew Huang to Inside Facebook, "People use status updates to tell stories about real world experiences. This is about making the site more engaging."

Nevertheless, there are also a number of benefits for event planners and group leaders. In the past the hashtag has been used to track event conversation and even field questions from an audience. Now instead of displaying a scrolling Twitter feed on a trade show screen, a group can simply pull up their Facebook page and all of the in-Facebook @ tags as well as media uploads will automatically populate the page wall. This is a great way to gather up scattered conversation and keep the momentum going for inspiring events. Look for the new feature to roll out incrementally in the next couple of weeks.

For those of you who don't know, Zigtag is another entry in the social bookmarking collection of tools. Like delicious, Diigo, and Ma.gnolia, Zigtag helps you categorize your bookmarks and share them with others. When Zigtag went into development, bookmarking was all the rage. The company's goal was to make bookmarking easier by adding a layer of semantics to the tags themselves.

Zigtag, you see, understands the meaning of the words you assign to a tag. When you tag to a page, Zigtag actually assigns it meaning rather than just a simple word. If that sounds revolutionary...well, that's because it is. Sort of.

Not the Only Semantic Tagging Service

Because of Zigtag's slow progress, they can no longer claim to be the only semantic tagging application available today. Another, Faviki, also offers an intelligent tagging service based on structured data. Both services attempt to address the problem of user-generated tags. That is, even though what you tag "NY" may be the same link that I tagged "New York," no bookmarking service ever knew the tags were related.

Zigtag and Faviki attack this problem in different ways. Faviki suggests tags for you to use, not from a community of users and their tagging history, but from structured information extracted from DBpedia, a community-maintained database created by extracting information from Wikipedia.

Zigtag, however, eschews suggestions and lets you tag items as you wish. It doesn't matter what personal system you use for tagging (one word, two words, underscores, plus signs, etc.) because Zigtag understands the meaning of the tags. In Zigtag, a link tagged "New York" is returned along with other links tagged "New_York." Zigtag also understands that one tag may have different meanings and groups those items accordingly. For example, there's a New York and Company clothing store and a New York in England that may have been tagged "new york." That level of understanding is something that's unique to Zigtag and sets it apart from other bookmarking services.

Thanks to the service's ability to understand meaning, Zigtag users can join groups related a shared interest. Since Zigtag knows what you mean by your tags, it is, in theory, easier to find links you would be interested in on Zigtag than with other bookmarking services.

Is This Really Web 3.0?

Zigtag may be one of the first tools to step out of the Web 2.0 box. Where "Web 2.0" implies there is a social element to a service, it's generally speculated that Web 3.0 will bring about the intelligent web. Zigtag delivers this intelligence, but is it enough?

The only downside to Zigtag is that it requires you, the user, to manually insert the tags. In fact, it even relies on user-generated tagging and has built its entire service around that concept. That may be where Zigtag went wrong. Although two years ago, what it offered was ground-breaking and unique, as we enter 2009, we're asking the question: "Is tagging dead?"

At first, collaborative tagging, also known as a folksonomy, appeared to be the future of the web. It was a rejection of the search engine in favor of the community. It was our collective intelligence harnessed for the purpose of applying meaning and order to the pieces of the web in ways that computer-based tools could not.

As time went on, though, the one thing that made a folksonomy appealing - it was made by people! - was also the very thing that gave it problems. User-generated tags were likely to produce unreliable results. Zigtag addresses that problem, but it does not address what may end up being the true source of failure for folksonomy-based systems: people are lazy.

Now that there are myriads of services using tagging, thanks to the explosion of Web 2.0, we're getting sick of all the manual labor involved. Tag your links, tag your photos, tag your blog entries, tag your RSS feeds, etc.

While at one time, a semantic-based tagging system like Zigtag may have seemed like a vision of Web 3.0, we've now come to a point where we wonder if it does enough. It's possible the next revolution of the web won't be a system that understands the meaning of the tags we created, but knows how we would have tagged things if we had bothered to do so and then does it for us. And if that's not the future of the web...well...perhaps it should be.

The objective of the VideoTagGame is to collect time-based annotations of the video which could then enable the retrieval of relevant parts in a video when a search is performed, rather than returning the entire video itself. These annotations are collected in the context of a multi-player game.

How To Play

To play the VideoTagGame, participants must sign in with their Yahoo! ID and join a new game. There will always be at least three players in each game. After a 3-second countdown, the video will begin to play. As it plays, participants enter tags that correspond to the various parts of the video. When two players agree on a tag (that is, they enter the same tag), they each get points. The closer together the tags were entered, the more points are rewarded. After the video ends, participants can then watch as it plays again, this time with the tags overlaid on top of the video.

The game, like Google Image Labeler, can be both fun and challenging for those involved. Think it sounds easy? Don't be fooled - the other participants are often fast typers capable of of entering nearly a hundred tags during a couple minutes of footage.

The VideoTagGame is a fun time-waster for those who like to play online games. It's similar to the games at the site Gwap ("games with a purpose"), launched by Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science, as it uses "the human processor," too. Like the GWAP games, the end result of the VideoTagGame is the possibility of enabling new technology for searching within videos...or your name at the top of the scoreboard...whichever one sounds more exciting to you.

For the marketer, this is an quick way to quickly push a message to wide group of people. Tag 20 friends, and through the friend-of-a-friend (FOAF) network, you could easily reach thousands.

According to AdAge, photos are an ideal vehicle for marketers for three reasons. Sam Lessin writes, "First, people love them and tend to click on them all the time. Second, they get incredible real estate in news feed. Third, any message put into photos has a strange automatic relevance because it is attached to the name of a friend. Finally, there is a huge curiosity factor as to why a friend is tagged in an image."

What's worse is that he concludes the article by encouraging people to use this new method of promotion. Yikes! We absolutely hate this idea and hope that Facebook figures out a way to stop this marketing loophole before news feeds get filled with spam.

Photo courtesy of Facebook

To mark its big day, we offer below two videos. The first an introduction to the tool for readers still unfamiliar and the second a screencast demonstrating just how easy and useful it is to make 5 changes to your Delicious experience. Those changes took us under 5 minutes.

We also want to take this opportunity to thank the Delicious team and especially now post-Yahoo founder Joshua Schachter, for making this awesome service what it is. We really appreciate it.

First, an Introduction

Thanks to CommonCraft for another great video.

And Now for Something New

The following video demonstrated five of our favorite ways to use Firefox plug-in Greasemonkey to radically change the Delicious experience. This is really easy to do, as you'll see, and we've included all the links below the video. With just a handful of clicks you can integrate Delicious into sites like Google Reader and Digg, you can sort and view Delicious in brand new ways, and make a number of other changes.

Note that there's no audio in this video, we just went through the steps. We hope that's ok for readers but if you'd prefer it be narrated, let us know.

Links shown in the screencast:

Greasemonkey

Delicious for google reader

Sort by popularity or other

digg.licio.us

subscribe in delicious

Favicious

Autopagerize

Now, every feed page on Toluu will show a "Tags" tab. This tab displays all the tags other users have already attached to the feed, as well as a text box to immediately start entering tags. Toluu also suggests tags based on a user's previous behavior on the site. The experience is reminiscent of tagging bookmarks in delicious, where the Ajax interface also makes adding suggested tags as easy as clicking on the keyword.

Besides this, Toluu has gone out of its way to expose these new features in as many places as possible. When browsing through a list of feeds, for example, a little '+' sign appears next to every feed you mouse over, which then exposes an inline tagging interface.

Searching Tags

Because tags are now available on Toluu, the developers have also added the ability to search the complete index of all feeds in Toluu for a specific tag, which is a great way to discover new and interesting feeds to subscribe to.

Overall, we think Toluu did a great job in adding this new feature and making it easily accessible throughout the site. As the tagging feature is still pretty new, only a select few feeds actually have tags attached to them, but as more users start tagging feeds, this will surely become one of the most popular features on Toluu.

These days, though, I'm noticing that on more and more sites the tag clouds have evaporated. I'm not saying they're dead (okay, granted, that's exactly what the cartoon's saying, but that's why they issue artistic licenses), but they're getting scarcer.

Now, the Flash splash screen? I'd go to that funeral in my dancing shoes.

[Ed: readers are encouraged to ignore the RWW tag cloud, located in our sidebar, for this post.]

Top image credit: ocean.flynn

When you're reading any item from a particular feed, you'll notice thumbs up/thumbs down buttons at the top for voting and a button that keeps track of how many votes a particular post has received. There's also an option to email the article to a friend or bookmark it for yourself.

Viewing a Post on FeedzZ

However, what's really interesting are the tags at the bottom of the post. These tags aren't generated by people, but by the underlying semantic technologies. For example, our recent post "Watch Out Silicon Valley: Here Comes NYC" was tagged: new york michael bloomberg internet week web-oriented technologies seed-stage technology fund. There's also a "related entries" link which displays a list of posts with at least one of the same tags. In this example, thanks to the tag "New York," there were several unrelated entries listed here, but there was also a link to an article about the NYC Seed Fund. So in this case, the more accurate results came from just viewing the "internet week" tag.

In addition to the tags on each post, every page of FeedzZ has an automatically generated, semantically created tag cloud on the left which you can use to see all the posts about a particular subject (Example: Bill Gates).

Issues With FeedzZ

Of course, these related entries and tags could become infinitely more useful if you were to upload your own OPML file. Unfortunately, for true feed junkies that's probably something that will have to wait, since FeedzZ currently imposes a limit on OPML file sizes, restricting them 100 KB or less. (At 142 KB for my subscription list, I was out of luck).

FeedzZ is certainly an interesting experiment in semantics, but that being said, the site still needs a lot more finesse to really be successful. The OPML restriction is only one of the issues. Even if you manage to get your OPML uploaded, it's difficult to determine how to proceed with the data you've imported. You have to find your way into your profile section (no link is provided) and then you have to create a folder structure and classify your feeds. Shouldn't a semantic system know where the feeds belong? When I tried this, I couldn't even classify my feeds manually. Although I clicked the "Classify" button, there was never a feed in the drop-down list to select (see below), so I couldn't proceed. It's as if that piece of the web site was not even built yet.

Attempting to Classify a Feed

These types of issues are major problems in terms of usability, so it's hard to truly recommend the site at this time. However, if these problems were resolved, FeedzZ could then have a shot at being a useful online feed aggregator or even a great research tool for finding related news items on the topics that interest you. It's great that FeedzZ has managed to get the semantic RSS technologies working, but now they need to turn their attention to the user experience and UI design so we all can appreciate their efforts.

Faviki's backend uses DBpedia, a community-maintained database created by extracting structured info from Wikipedia and turning that into a database which you can query. (You can read our previous coverage on DBpedia here).

This means that instead of just being words, the tags in this data model become references to objects which are categorized automatically. An example from the Faviki blog cited an example using the tag "Coca-Cola." An item you tagged with this concept would actually reference the unique URL http://dbpedia.org/data/Coca-Cola (the tag is the last part of that URL). Under other tagging systems, the same item may have been tagged with cocacola, coca-cola, coca+cola, CocaCola, but in Faviki, it's simply "Coca-Cola." And because the tags structure is already emanating from the largest collection of concepts in the world - Wikipedia - their format is already standardized and agreed upon by the community.

Using Faviki

Despite Faviki's lofty goals, it's just as easy to use as any other bookmarking service. Once you sign up, you can install a browser bookmarklet which you can use to save links and tag them. You can also search your tags or click through the site's tag cloud to view some of the most popular saved links from the Faviki community.

A Search on Faviki

Unfortunately, there is no way to import your bookmark collection from another service. This is probably because doing so would necessitate completely re-tagging every link-  that would certainly require too much effort on the part of a user if it was a manual process and I imagine it's also difficult to create a service that would automatically scan each link and tag it appropriately. However, without this option, it will be hard to get users to completely switch over from whatever service they are using now.

What Problem Faviki Solves

Because Faviki uses structured tagging, there is more that can be learned about a particular tag, its properties, and its connections to other tags. The system will automatically know what tags belong together and how they relate to others.

There has been a lot of discussion around this topic lately. At the recent Next Web conference in Amsterdam, Nova Spivack, the founder of Twine, predicted that over the next 10-15 years, tags will play an increasingly important role in the structure of the web, while keywords disappear.

If that turns out to be true, then Faviki represents a big step in that direction by offering a transitional service between social bookmarking and a purely semantic-based bookmarking service that would automatically know how to tag any content saved by discovering the semantic aspects already associated with that web page.

Grossman's plugins, which are available as an auto tagger and an archive tagger (to go back and tag old posts), received over 500 downloads in the first two days. The plugins work by sending post text to Calais and retrieving a list of suggested tags. The plugins rely on an Open Calais PHP class, also written by Grossman. Eventually, the plugins will be released under a Creative Commons license. Grossman tells us he's waiting until the next Calais feature update, scheduled for May 1st, before adding any more features to his plugins.

As we've noted, because of Calais' roots as Clearforest the rules it applies while parsing text are biased toward the language of business. That means that business or tech bloggers will likely find more utility in Calais for the time being. If you're writing about Fortune 500 companies, the Calais Wordpress Auto Tagger plugin might be very useful, but if you routinely write about sewing teddy bears, though, its usefulness might be dubious.

Unfortunately for Grossman, the application deadline for the $5000 bounty passed in March and Reuters has since farmed out the work of creating a Wordpress plugin to a commercial firm. Though work on that plugin continues, we're told that people at Calais have expressed interested in working with Grossman on future Calais-related projects. Open Calais is one of the most interesting new semantic APIs, and we're keen to see developers finally start to embrace it and make some useful mashups.