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Folksonomies (the first meme of 2005?) is attributed by Wikipedia to Thomas Vander Wa.

Adam Mathes has a thesis on Folksonomies which examines user-generated metadata as implemented and applied in two web services - Del.icio.us and Flickr - designed to share and organize digital media to better understand grassroots classification.

IFTF's Future Now makes a point about problems with folksonomies: no synonym control ( "mac" and "macintosh" on Del.icio.us); no hierarchy and content types; and only simple one-word tags. Are these features or bugs? Consensuss says 'feature'. Andrew Ducker has a suggestion for synonyms and a modest proposal

Joho the Blog notices a discussion about what to call it in Mob indexing? Folk categorization? Social tagging?,
John Battelle links into Taggle and "federated tagging".

I wonder if a Google Suggest like system might reduce 'lazy tagging' ,and maybe synonym control when the federation appears.

New: In Beyond Laser Tag and Telephone Tag, JC Francois wonders if "2005 will be the year of tagging".

Will Folksonomies lead to the nirvana of the Semantic Web, or at least Semantic web light? (see : ftrain.com August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web)

Tag, you're still it!"

Why stop with lesser mammals and avians? Humans do it too.

Didn't Palm already get in trouble with this with their "Simply pr0n^H^H^H^HPalm" campaign? (Obligatory parodies here :)

A little bit of research shows up this on how google sets works. There's a link on the bottom of that message for an introduction to faceted sets.

And now for the fun bit. Looking for set with just the keyword Porn, I got some very interesting results:

Here's how you do it:

1. Go to Left Bank Books
2. Click on 'I'
3. Go to page three of four.
4. The third entry, with a'New' image, is the book Information Liberation. Click on the 'Buy' icon.
5. You can handle it from here.

Part of their problem is they're using the fundamentally brain damaged monstrosity known as "BROADVISION". The other part is that they're idiots. They didn't do that on purpose, you know, they just don't know any better.

http://peterme.com/bvsucks

+---+

You have a variety of options here:

* Use a piece of hardware, like Cisco's Local Director
* Use round-robin DNS
* Use a proxy who passes connects through to the application servers

Depending on the underlying application, it's possible that the user has to be tied to his webserver once a session is established (BroadVision for example needs that - look here for comments).

We're coping with that by Configuring our servers like the following:

* Load Balancer holds address www and transparently redirects to webservers www-1, www-2, www-3, ...
* The www-n Hosts have VirtualHost sections like that:

NameVirtualHost IP-Address-Of-Host
<VirtualHost IP-Address-Of-Host>
ServerName www.our-domain.net
Redirect / www-n.our-domain.net
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost IP-Address-Of-Host>
ServerName www-n.our-domain.net
DocumentRoot ...
...
</VirtualHost>

This results clients that initially hit on www to be redirect and then hardwired to e.g. www-4, but it has the drawback that the client will also bookmark www-4 and not www.

Handling dead webservers with the Cisco Local Director is no problem because it will recognize the dead link and take the machine out of service. Using a proxy or the round robin DNS solution will most likely require a bit of programming on a monitor machine, but shouldn't be that much of a hassle.

I'd suggest to preconfigure all www-n IP-Addresses on all machines, and as soon as one machine drops, another machine takes the appropriate interface up and gets a load-bonus on the balancing mechanism.

Remeber that ad with the naked woman holding a Palm V? She was "Kate Hunter, Dancer", and she supposedly used her palm to enter to-do's involving legwarmers. There's a bit of a story about that ad.

The first I heard of that ad was an email to all Palm employees giving us a "heads up" that it would soon be coming out. They told us what publications it would run in (things like "Yahoo: Internet life", "Business Week", and "Golf Digest"; all of them magazines with a more or less male demographic). They also told us what to say if we met someone who was offended by it. Apparently, as employees, we weren't allowed to be offended by it ourselves. We were to say things like "The model wasn't really naked during the photo shoot" (as if a naked woman in a room with a camera is more immoral than running a national ad campaign which objectifies women), "This ad was approved by a team of female executives" (as if women never harm other women), and "The message is the beauty of the female form" (look, girls, it's OK, we're saying that you're pretty. Can you say pretty?).

A lot of people were unhappy with that email. If you're so worried that the ad is going to offend people, why do you run it? People flamed back at whatever marketing stiff sent the email, there was discussion in the hallways.

So marketing spammed us all two more times. They essentially repeated the same points, but they had one new point to make that topped it all: They hadn't meant to give the impression that the naked woman Palm ad was the only ad in this campaign. The Simply Palm campaign is a series of ads. In this ad, there's a naked woman, but in other ads use "other beautiful objects, such as a motorcycle and a designer chair" to sell the palm.

That's right, that's a direct quote: "other beautiful objects".

I guess whoever wrote that email has been in a hole since the 60's, to be so ignorant of feminist thought; they certainly haven't ever heard of the word "objectification".

Then later, of course, there was the "Simply Porn" side of the controversy, where 3Com's bonehead lawyers sent a cease-and-desist to a website that had parodies of the Palm ad.

What does this have to do with gaming ads? Well, for one thing, I think the remarkable idiocy showed by marketing throughout this saga argues against the idea that they have any special handle on what "objectively" sells product. Running sexist ads doesn't make you a capitalist, it makes you a sexist. Second, I think that this shows that the ridiculous sexism and objectification shown in gaming mags really does matter; it has a way of bleeding over into more mainstream ads for technology products.

Disclaimer: I no longer work for 3com as an employee, but this was not the reason I quit. Since Palm has reorganized and is soon splitting off from 3Com, I have no reason to believe that the boneheads responsible for "simply palm" are still around. I'm one of the most boycott-happy people I know, and I wouldn't scruple to buy a Palm V at this point. If you read this and work for Palm, you probably recognize me. If so, please do not forward this comment around within Palm. I'm not ashamed of telling the truth, but if the legal department got word that I'd revealed "company-confidential email", I might get in trouble. Palm marketing might have a few IQ points over 3Com marketing, but lawyers are still lawyers.

A very large Amen! to that.

I love SOAP, and the whole XML-RPC concept. I've been using it for a month, and it's giving a lightweight protocol for shoving simple well-structured data around an Extranet. Yes, I've done DCOM, I even know a little about CORBA. Neither of these would have given me the ease of setup (especially at the client's site, and behind the client's firewall) that I get with XML-RPC (my strict SOAP compliance is ragged).

If I was doing SOAP right now, I'd be doing pure http and using URLs that put BroadVision to shame.

Yes, tunnelling everything through http to get past the firewall is bad juju. When we start seeing commonplace SOAPservers that are worth subverting, then it really will be time to worry about it. Anyone for challenge-response firewall tunnels opened on the basis of certificates in the SOAP header elements ? I currently have an open SOAPserver that would attempt to ship you a bucketful of valuable product, in response to a trivially formatted SOAP request (Don't try it - there's also a human reading the orders). To regain the security benefit of reliable firewalls (reliably culling the nasties below the application level), then we'll start needing techniques like this as standard. After all, no-one needs (sic) a firewall today, as all our machines are secured anyway...

OTOH - No way would I be pushing DCOM around a big LAN, let alone across the 'Net at large. No F'ing way, not after the continual shafting from Teardrop/NewTear that my ports took back in the Service Pack 3 days.