Berkman Hosts Joshua Schachter of Del.icio.us Tuesday (10/25)
David Weinberger’s Web of Ideas series at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society features Del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter on Tuesday evening, October 25, from 6 pm to 7:30 pm. Free pizza! Del.icio.us is a popular social bookmark tool featuring tagging, a type of metatdata for the people by the people. His talk, which is open to the public, will be about the future of tagging.
These Web of Ideas discussions are usually quite fun and interesting. It’s often a short presentation followed by lots of interaction among those present.
Schachter will also be the guest of Berkman’s luncheon series earlier in the day. The RSVP deadline for this lunch has already passed. These talks are usually Webcast. Details should be available on the Berkman Center’s Web site close to 12:30 pm, when the lunch begins.
Addenda 10/25: Berkman has details on their blog. IRC: freenode.net/globalvoices
Joshua is speaking off the cuff. David Weinberger and John Palfrey are asking him various questions to start the discussion. Joshua said there are an average of two tags per item, 500,000ish unique tags, and millions of items or posts or something like that.
RMack asked about tags in other languages. Joshua said people complain because some users don’t want to see other languages in Del.icio.us.
EthanZ wonders whether Joshua encourages geeky users or wants Del.icio.us to span to all sorts of people. Joshua wants all types of people to use the service.
Joshua mentioned a Tim O’Reilly presentation.
Brett observed that opening the Del.icio.us API seems to have done lots of beneficial things for the site.
EthanZ asked about matching similarities in Del.icio.us since he’s used the service as a networking tool. He says it works better with quirky tags or posts.
“Is any metadata a tag? Obviously, that’s not the case,” Joshua says while talking about types of data that can be in tags.
When addressing spam, Joshua says sometimes finding spammers isn’t so easy. Some of them are obviously spammers. Others are just clogging the system in ways that aren’t helpful. He mentioned some specifc examples, like someone who wanted to bookmark every single page in Wikipedia. Is that person being helpful or harmful?
6:10 pm: Rumor has it live audio for the Web of Ideas talk is at: http://h2odev.law.harvard.edu:8000/. This will only last as long as the talk lasts. It should end around 7:30 pm. Couple people are hanging in various IRC locations on freenode.net: globalvoices and berkmanbloggroup.
