VocabControl

This is a very personal post about topics in which I am not an expert, so I welcome comments and suggestions.

When “like” and “lol” don’t help

In February, a young man I had never met died in sad circumstances. He was a friend of a friend and I was supposed to meet him on the day he died. Completely coincidentally, within a fortnight I myself lost a dear friend, someone I had known for over 20 years.

The closeness in timing has thrown out sharp contrasts in the way that these deaths have reverberated around my social media worlds (obviously the real world impacts have been huge, but I am not going to discuss those here).

In many ways, dealing with the death of my own friend on social media has been easier. Being well known to her family and her circle of closest friends has meant that I have felt able to post messages of condolence and remembrance as I instinctively know what is appropriate, and I know that most of the people reading them will know me. It has been strange to see her name pop up as a “friend available on chat” when I know any activity in her account must be one of her family members logging in to maintain the page. Yesterday was her birthday, and the reminders in my calendar and the little birthday gift “event reminder” were bittersweet, but not unwelcome. I think of her and her family often, and do not want to forget.

Just after she died, I received a message through a social media site from someone I had never met or even heard of, who had been a schoolfriend of hers long ago, asking what had happened to our mutual friend, and I felt comfortable in answering. It helped me to talk about her with this stranger. I even flattered myself that I was doing some good, in that they clearly felt awkward about contacting her family directly while I was able to act as an “information resource” meaning the family and closest friends could focus on their own grieving.

I friend dead people

In contrast, how to cope with the loss of an almost-friend on social media has been strange and unnerving. One social media application has tactlessly and repeatedly suggested him as a friend, noting how many friends we had (have?) in common. Somehow I didn’t have the heart to click on “ignore”. I realise now I should have done just that, because I was anguished when I accidentally clicked on “confirm”. I worried that his friends and relatives might see my “friend request” and be distressed by it. Maybe they would never spot the noitification, maybe they would assume it was sent at a time before his death - just another reminder of what might have been, maybe they would even be comforted by the continuation of these distant social interactions with almost-strangers. (I immediately emailed the site in question asking them to retrieve my suggestion, but received no reply.)

My uncertainty about the appropriate “social media etiquette” was no doubt increased rather than diminished by our social distance. I do not know his family and friends well enough to mention this casually in passing, to express that this had been a mistake and was not intended to distress, or even to know what sort of people they are and whether this is the sort of thing that might upset them. However, it is exactly these sort of loose “one degree of separation” relationships that online social media foster and this incident struck me as illustrating how inadequate such media are when interactions need to go beyond chirruping about the weather, saying a website is cool, or asking whether or not someone wants to go to a party.

Digital memorials

My friend’s social media pages have slipped into being a form of digital memorial, but this also raises new issues. There have been stories in the press of “trolls” deliberately desecrating memorial pages in an online equivalent of upturning flowers left on a grave or kicking over and spraying graffiti on a headstone (e.g. http://gawker.com/5868503/why-people-troll-dead-kids-on-facebook). The only way to deal with this seems to be to remove the page, which is a shame and in a way seems to mean the bullies have won. It also highlights a strange transition from personal to public. Our graveyards are either public spaces that the authorities monitor and maintain or privately curated grounds. I have previously thought of my social media pages as more like a private garden - people may peer over the wall, but it is essentially “my” space to maintain. People are starting to think more and more about their digital legacies (the British Computer Society recently held an event on this theme).

There are already “digital memorial” companies offering guarantees of “permanent” archiving and access to sites (e.g. Much Loved). Other sites offer memorial pages that allow people to make donations to charity, but presumably these are not expected to remain in place forever.

However, these sites are aimed at those who remain setting up the sites, not taking over the sites that belonged to their loved ones. The value of someone’s posts and pages changes dramatically when they become precious memories, and not just ephemeral chatter. If we (or our loved ones) want our own sites to go on after us, do we need to bequeath our passwords to trusted friends or family? How does that affect our contracts with hosts and service providers? What rights do families have to “reclaim” the pages and content if there is no such bequest? How would disputes over inheritance of such sites be decided? What recourse do we have if the site owner decides to shut down and delete the content or simply loses it?

It seems to me that such issues have the potential to cause far more distress than the strangenesses we encounter when automated reminders and friend suggestions behave as if we are all immortal.

I was delighted to be asked by the DAM Foundation to join a panel for Communicate Magazine’s Transform conference, talking about metadata and its importance in digital asset management and brand management, with a focus on re-branding (hence the conference title). I spoke alongside Mark Davey, from the DAM Foundation, Romney Whitehead of Net a Porter, and Phil Morton, of Freestyle Interactive.

Marketing meets metadata

I was heartened by the growing enthusiasm for bringing together “geeky” metadata specialists with “creative” marketing people. I think both communities of practice have a lot to learn from each other, even though it may seem we speak totally different languages and care about totally different things. I do my best to act as a “boundary object” or translator bringing together our different perspectives - I like to joke that my role is all about putting the “sexy into taxonomy”.

I find conferences are a great source of serendipitous discovery, making me think about business needs and processes that I don’t usually encounter in my day job. One example was a presentation about the recent major re-branding project by Global Blue - the tax free shopping corporation. I learned about the breakdown of the distinction between global and local marketing campaigns and customer service. This is because the luxury shopping market is aimed at the global travelling community who fly around the world and prefer shopping to visiting museums and art galleries. High-end brands need to provide services for these customers not locally to their home towns, but in the shops they visit, by - for example, having Russian- and Chinese-speaking sales assistants in outlets in Paris, London, and Berlin.

In data terms, this means making sure customer relations management is global, and marketing campaigns travel with the customer as they move, rather than being tied to places. This requires sophisticated personal and social metadata management. It is no longer enough to keep customer data in localised silos, as a customer wants to be recognised at every store in the chain everywhere in the world. In other words, there is no such thing as local for these shoppers any more, there is only location - local is wherever they happen to be right now.

This may seem like an obvious point, but for information managers it poses many challenges regarding data security and compliance with different laws in different countries. For brand managers, marketers, and designers, it means devising campaigns that make sense in local cultures, but also appeal to viewers from all over the world.

DAM to protect good supplier as well as customer relations

Romney Whitehead described how important it is for Net a Porter to track the rights, restrictions, and usage of their content as it is used in different media and in different parts of the world. So, if they have acquired the rights to images of a fashion show in Paris, they may only be able to use those shots in certain locations or in particular publications (Europe, but not the USA, print but not online, etc.). Mistakes could lead to their suppliers refusing to provide images in future, which would be very damaging for the company. Their DAM system is therefore vital to their business.

Internally social

Phil Morton talked about the rise of social media and how corporations need to embrace social media in particular for in-house corporate communications and knowledge management. Many organisations still see social media as something that happens “outside” the organisation, but for younger workers and for collaborative projects, internal social media is becoming a key daily business tool, so information managers have to consider how to provide access to and archiving of key social media conversations.

This is clearly a hot topic, as it was discussed at a Sue Hill networking event I attended last week and which I will write about in my next post.

Is Google Wave a Twitter Killer? heralds the new kid soon to be on the block. Facebook seem to fall into the “so over” category a while back, and now Twitter has hit the mainstream, clearly it is next to go.

Google Wave: Five Things You Must Know says a bit more about what Wave will do.

The combination of easy transfer of time-invested work - such as carefully written documents - with instant communication should appeal to businesses but will present some records management challenges, I’m sure. I can’t decide whether we need social media coalescence - just give me everything in one place - or clearer fragmentation - Wave for work, Facebook for family, etc. to help with information overload.

UPDATE: Amplified clip on Wave.

It seems that everyone’s social networks are getting out of hand and the heart of the web 2.0 world now needs a bit of old fashioned tidying up. From hierarchies of “friends” to classic categorisations by topic, it’s time to start applying good old taxonomical principles to your social media:

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Mashable/~3/0EWPlJVKNSE/

http://www.orsiso.com/aboutus.html.

The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid is an info classic. It’s one of those delightful books that manages to be very erudite, cover a huge range of theory, but reads effortlessly and even had me laughing out loud from time to time. (My favourite anecdote was that BT’s answer to homeworkers’ sense of isolation was to pipe a soundtrack of canned background noise and chatter into their offices!)

Essentially, the book argues that information and information technology cannot be separated from its social context and ignoring the human factors in technology adoption and use leads to fundamental misunderstandings of what it can and does do. This may mean overestimating the potential of information technology to change pre-existing institutions and practices, on both a personal and collective scale, and underestimating the ability of people to adapt technology to suit their ends rather than those envisaged by the technologists.

The authors argue that many “infoenthusiasts” miss subtleties of communication, such as the implicit social negotiations that take place in face-to-face conversations or the social meanings conveyed by a document printed on high quality paper or a book with expensive leather binding. Such nuances are easily lost when the words from such communications are removed from their original context and placed in a new environment - such as an electronic database.

Similarly, although personalisation is often touted as a great advance - you can have your own uniquley customised version of a website or a newspaper - such personalisation diminishes the power of the information source to act as a binding-point for a community. If we all have different versions of the newspaper, then we can’t assume we share common knowledge of the same stories. We then have to put additional work into reconnecting and recreating our knowledge communities, so the benefits of personalisation do not come without costs.

The importance of negotiation, collaboration, and improvisation is argued to be highly significant but extremely hard to build into automated systems. The social nature of language and the complexities of learning how to be a member of a community of practice, including knowing when to break or bend rules, are also essential to how human beings operate but extremely difficult to replicate in technological systems.

The theme of balance runs throughout the book - for example between the need to control processes while allowing freedom for innovation in companies or between the need for communication amongst companies and the need to protect intellectual property (knowledge in companies was often either seen as too “sticky” - hard to transfer and use - or too “leaky” - flowing too easily to competitors). At an institutional level, balance is needed between the importance of stability for building trust and openness to evolution (the perception of the value of a degree is bound up with the established reputation of an educational institution).

I found this very interesting, as my brother has been trying to persuade me that Daoism with its emphasis on things moving gradually from one state to another is a more productive way at looking at complex systems than the Aristotelian view that something can be in one category, or its opposite, but never both at once. (Here is a sisterly plug for an article he has written on the application of Daoist ideas to environmentalism). It also fits in with the idea of balancing the stability of an ordered taxonomy with the fast-flowing nature of folksonomies and of finding a way of using social media to support rather than compete with more formalised knowledge management practice. Brown and Duguid say: “For all the advantages of fluidity, we should not forget that fixity still has its charms. Most of us prefer the checks we receive and the contracts we write to remain stable”, which seems particularly apt given the global credit crisis!

I went on Tuesday to Online 2008 at Olympia. It seemed quieter than last year, so I took advantage of some of the free presentations. I listened to Laurent Le Meur talking about Agence France-Presse (AFP)’s efforts to create a multimedia news database - (Imageforum), Graham Beastall of Soutron Ltd on Taxonomy Development using Sharepoint, Scott Gavin on Knowledge Plaza, and Judith Lewis of i-level on the Dark Side of Social Media.

Le Meur described the need to create a common metadata language to bring together journalists and photographers, who tended to think about subjects very differently. AFP use autocategorisation software (supplied by Temis) but have invested heavily in training it to work well, in other words lots of human input. They imported a number of existing vocabularies from such sources as GeoNames, EuroVoc, and the IPTC’s taxonomy of news categories as a base, selecting 300 of the IPTC’s 1,300 categories to improve software performance. They currently extract and autocategorise people, organisations, locations, points of interest, products, and brands. They would realy like to be able to pick out news events, but language usage is too broad and diffuse for them to have managed this with any success.

Their documentalists and indexers were initially reluctant to work with the new system as it meant a dramatic reduction in the complexity of their indexing work. Previously they could use some 3,000 terms but this was reduced in order to be compatible with the entity extraction software.

For images, they found the key facets were expressions (e.g. smiling), action, aspect (e.g. profile, close-up) and style (e.g. backlit). They are happy with the Antidot faceted navigation system that allows them to choose index fields, but have not been able to incorporate image rights, as they are too complex and vary according to things like location of the user.

Beastall said that users of Sharepoint are not fully exploiting it, with only 4% using it as a tool for search, while 43% use it for collaborative working. He warned that you need to impose discipline in categorisation right from the start of an implementation as once information has “grown wild” it is far harder to retrospectively tidy it up. He also pointed out that people tend to think they know where to find things, but then someone else has a site reorganisation, so if key information wasn’t well indexed, it can be lost.

There is also value in segmenting your information so that you have public areas separate from the main enterprise content management system. Such public areas can then be treated differently in terms of things like security and social working. An interesting take on the taxo/folkso synergy is to let people build their own sites, but to have a central team looking out for good candidates for inclusion in centralised systems, and to bring personal sites in when they are useful, amalgamating to remove duplicates, etc. He encouraged the use of folksonomies as a “fast track” to sit beside the core vocabularies and feed into them, as folksonomies are particularly useful for new and fast-moving areas, but not so good for long term management and control. He cited the websites contentandcode.com - a Microsoft solutions provider, The Information Architecture Institute, a useful article on taxonomies, thesauruses, etc., by metamodel, and the Sharepoint blog vitalskill.com.

Knowledge Plaza is a CMS [Scott Gavin has pointed out that it is actually more a Knowledge Management/Enterprise Search tool - see his comment] that allows a dual taxo/folkso approach, with options for a totally open folkso system, a managed folkso system, where users can use any tag they like, but an administrator effectively builds a thesuarus in the background to link synonyms and prompt future users with preferred terms, and a totally controlled vocabulary.

Social search seemed to be a buzzword this year, and Gavin talked about a function that allowed you to “use people as search engines” but as far as I could tell, this actually meant the system simply recorded everybody’s search results, websites visited, etc., and then allowed other people to run a search on specific people’s collections of information. [Actually, the system runs live Google searches on the websites particular people have looked at, as well as emails, documents, etc associated with them or that are tagged a particular way - see Scott’s comment for more details].

Lewis’s talk wasn’t a cultural critique of the effect of social media on humanity, but a useful practical guide to how to avoid breaking the law and causing damage to brand reputation by using social media badly. Essentially - don’t pose as a genuine customer when you are working for a company and don’t disguise advertisements by making them indistinguishable from articles (which can be a bit of a grey area). She also suggested that it was better to have one company blog and get lots of people to contribute to it to keep it moving, than have lots of company blogs that are hardly ever updated.

Following on from my post the other day, it occurred to me that Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon is a bit like social media. We enforce a social norm not through pressure but through constant mutual observation.

This post on the election of Obama and the Facebook effect seems to be a different slant on the same idea: Unit Structures – Regarding the Facebook Effect. Fred Stutzman claims “Social Networks like Facebook reveal our lives to one another in novel and interesting ways. I’m able to friend you and watch your life pass by in a News Feed. Because of the pragmatics of daily life I probably wouldn’t be able to keep up with that information otherwise. A side effect of this is that I’m also influenced by you - your decisions about the information you share or the identity you create…Obama was not elected because of a “Facebook Effect.” No, what happened is that the internet helped us pull the veil back on one another.”

Stutzman sees this as a positive “moderating” effect, but it seems rather like the “dark side” of social media discussed by James Surowiecki in The turning point for social media | Video on TED.com. Surowiecki argues that the “wisdom of crowds” only works when the members of the crowd think as independently as possible, but that when you join a network or group, you begin to lose some of that independence. The network influences what seems to be important (”groupthink”) and independent thought can actually suffer as a result. He uses the analogy of ants who get trapped in a “circular mill” where they just follow each other round and round in a circle until they die. This is the “dark side” of social media, which contrasts with the positive power of distributed intelligence.

So, although it is good to share, if we watch each other too assiduously, we risk losing the individuality and independence that made us intelligent in the first place. We may be social creatures, but it does us good to be a little bit anti-social too!

Battle of Ideas: Privacy is Dead. Long Live Privacy? is a long video but well worth watching (it is divided into sections so doesn’t have to be seen in one go). The description says: “For many of us, divulging intimate details of our private lives via social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook has become the norm. But information and communication technologies have also facilitated surveillance and data gathering by government and big businesses. While in some contexts we seem so ready to give up our privacy, in others we seem increasingly anxious to protect it.”

The debate was hosted by the Institute of Ideas and features six excellent speakers who talk about designing technology so that it doesn’t violate privacy, the social and political debates - or lack thereof - around notions of what is public and what is private, and the effects of social media and new technology.

I found this very interesting as bridging a couple of themes that have been on my mind after hearing a talk by Matthew of 6consulting - a social media monitoring and engagement company. Firstly, the blurring of the lines between private and public in online spaces, which was also raised in relation to the national web archiving initiatives by the British Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF -which I wrote about in October) and secondly the idea that social media are taking over from traditional knowledge management. It has all left me wondering if social media will eat itself. It makes me think of science fiction stories about telepathy driving everyone crazy because actually knowing what people are thinking about you all the time is a nightmare!

I am a frequent user of social and real world networks and am also happy to have an online presence that is a public “performed” persona. However, I also like to have spaces where I can try out new and possibly crazy ideas in the company of friends without worrying that every off the wall idea is going to be preserved for ever more. I don’t want the world to see me “in rehearsal”, so does that mean I shouldn’t use social media spaces to experiment with ideas? If so, I can only try out ideas with the people I am geographically close to, which again seems to undermine part of the wonderful global connectivity of the online space. Closed, private networks, where we invite only people we can trust, get round this, but then you lose the power and appeal of the mass open networks.

So, how does this relate to taxonomies? Jeffrey Rosen talks about surveillance cameras being used as a tool for “classification and exclusion” of people - e.g. you are categorised as a shoplifter, so you are banned from the city centre, which links to Bowker and Star’s work on the politics of catgorisation of people in Sorting Things Out. I think that as knowledge workers, we are perhaps more aware than others of the potential uses and abuses of personal data and so we should be contributing to the debate on what information should be collected, classified, archived, and destroyed.

I was drawn to Venkat’s post on the Enterprise 2.0 blog via What Ralph Knows. Venkat suggests that Knowledge Management and Social Media are in conflict, with younger people preferring an anarchic, organic approach to building knowledge repositories, while older people prefer highly planned structures, and Generation X (of which I am one) remain neutral. I’m always a bit suspicious of generational divisions, as there are plenty of older innovators and young reactionaries, but I must admit I take a “best of both worlds” approach - so I conform to my generational stereotype!

I think the “battle” mirrors the taxonomy/folksonomy debate and experts I’ve asked about this suggest that the best way is to find a synergy. It all depends on the context, what is being organised, and what is needed. So social media are obviously great for certain things, but I’d hate to trust the company’s financial records to a bunch of accountants who said - “oh we don’t bother sorting and storing our files - if we need to prove your tax payments we’ll just stick a post on a forum and see if anyone still has the figures….”