Steve -

Once again you’ve yanked me, like a stubborn radish, from my troglodyte garden and have shaken the cakey mud from roots. I have some catching up to do ~

First, let me point out that while Budd’s presentation was helpful in many ways, it was an outline that lacks the narrative we radishes and tubers need. But I was relieved to read that Web 2.0 (and by extenstion Lib 2.0) is a “state of mind” and not another new application or Google product. And, as his presentation says, “I’ve been doing this for years!” (Well, maybe not years, and not doing all of it, but some of it.)

I feel confident in an old man way about the spirit of Web 2.0. User control, data accessible across platforms and hardware, community and sense of ownership, and the “rich user experience” all ring true in my soil-filled, loamy ears.

But I’m behind on some of my buzzwords. Because, while our own blog here has a link for RSS, I really don’t know what that means. “RSS” quickly became an acronym that people began throwing around and sheepish vegetables like me just kept quiet, hoping to figure out RSS the way I figured out so many others things – by osmosis.

Steve, could you tell me what RSS and folksonomies are?

Also, Budd’s slide on “Core Web 2.0 Technologies” is discouragingly spare (i.e. written for those who already know the terms). Could you fill in the blanks for “Ajax” and “Open data through API’s and web services”?

This might be more than you can handle at one time, and I’m willing to read a few consecutive entries – maybe even as separate posts and not as “comments”. I would consider it a primer for the Year 2006, the Year of the Radish.

For a quick, but not necessarily thorough response, I will point you to some slides of my own. I did a presentation for a graduate seminar on managing information through the use of alert services, RSS, and citation management tools. Begin at slide 11 for info on RSS.

(I had fun using the animation features to try to get across some of the points, so I would recommend doing a Slide Show > View Show for the full experience…)

Steve -

I appreciate the NCSU definitions:

“1. What is RSS?
RSS, stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, and is another term for a news feed. RSS is a means by which content from selected Web sites is syndicated and delivered to your computer without having to continually revisit those sites searching for new content.

“2. What is a news feed?
A news feed (also referred to as an RSS feed) provides a listing of a Web site’s recently-updated content and is delivered to users at regular intervals by a news reader. Users subscribe to the news feeds of their choice, which transmit a list of story headlines, story summaries or excerpts, and links to the complete text of stories from the originating Web site. The headlines, summaries and links are delivered to users at regular intervals specified by the user (every hour, for example) through a news reader.”

Honestly, I hadn’t been aware of the alert options in PubMed etc. because I don’t use those databases. I need to look into the humanities databases to see if they incorporate them, too.

Folksonomies: metadata and description for the people.

“These days, a growing number of sites whose content is user-created rely on tagging systems, also known as folksonomies,” is how social tagging and folksonomies are described in a Wired Magazine article: “Folksonomies Tap People Power.” The article continues

“It’s very much people tagging information so that they can come back to it themselves or so that others with the same vocabulary can find it,” said Thomas Vander Wal, the information architect credited with coining the term “folksonomy.”

AJAX: Asynchronous JavaScript and XML

This is the technology that drives the slick new services like Flickr, GMail, Google Suggest, or Google Maps.

This is a good quote from the Wikipedia site: “Like DHTML, LAMP, or SPA, Ajax is not a technology in itself, but a term that refers to the use of a group of technologies together.”

Thanks to Andy Budd for the clarification on Ajax and API!

To return briefly to folksonomies, I can see both sides of the coin (controlled vs. natural vocabularies) – but which side is heavier is less clear to me. Flickr, having no controlled vocabulary and not necessarily needing one or wanting one, has the great feature called “clustering,” so that a subject cluster for “dog” will include “dog,” “dogs,” “puppies,” etc. In this case, the search becomes less precise but might better resolve the searcher’s needs. For such a non-academic purpose, this strikes me as really bright.

I also like the option in RefWorks, for example, where users can assign their own “subjects”, termed “descriptors.” People who can’t necessarily get down with a subject heading like “Printing – France – History – 18th century,” might be better able to boogie with “Book history” (you might guess, this is an example from my own RefWorks account!).

But as has been noted by Steve, some things we need to “take […] in moderation and know both their strengths and their perils.” Because launching such ideas into more public and complex systems, which demand standards and precision, is a whole other animal entirely. What’s more, the more we teach our students to assign their own custom subject headings, the less they’ll be able to interact with databases like OPACs, which demand an understanding that all vocabularies can’t be so flip.

Let me steal a minute and get back to the blog with a mere comment.

I would also like to extend a ‘thanks’ to Andy for offering more insights on the topic. Once again his points are very clear and consise.

A new article on this topic can be found over at A List Apart in Jeffrey Zeldman’s insightful and ammusing article Web 3.0.