tfpl blog

Blog competition results

Thank you so much to everyone who entered our famous landmarks competition.  Hundreds of you did so, hoping for the chance of winning a luxury John Lewis Hamper.

Well, the results are in and we are delighted to announce that Susan Moore, of ICAEW is the lucky winner of that chocolate monopoly and everything else.

What do words mean?

I have really enjoyed playing around on wordie (thanks to Euan Semple for the tip off).

Wordie describes itself as 'Flickr without the photos'.  But I think it is more like Del.icio.us without the weblinks. On del.icio.us you use  words to 'tag' your favourite websites.  On wordie you simply deposit your favourite words.  When you deposit a word the word gets added to your webpage, and your name gets added to the webpage for that word, effectively pointing you in the direction of other people who like that word.

Wordie is like a two legged folksonomy.  Folksonomies create links between people, words and resources by allowing people to use words to tag resources (see picture below). Wordie just links people and words.  The word is both the tag and the resource, the means and the end.

Wordie also allows you to create specific lists of words: check out 'she blinded me with pseudoscience'.

Its obviously early days yet.  But what will wordie tell us about our language(s) in a few years time, if it catches on? You have the ability on wordie to leave a comment with each word you deposit. You might say what associations the word has for you, or why it interests you.  The comments accumulate on that word's webpage. 

Dictionaries only tell us what words mean.  I hope wordie grows to show us what words means to individuals, to people, to us.

Christmas hamper competition

If you are planning to send us back your answers to the postcard picture competition, please post it to us today! 

We are planning to make the draw next Wednesday (13th December) to ensure the lucky winner gets their John Lewis goodies in good time for Christmas.

HURRY!

Our link to Razorlight

Last week I spoke about folksonomy at the Online 2006 exhibition.  I used Del.icio.us as an example.  Del.icio.us is the folksonomy created by the hundreds of thousands of people around the world who use it to 'tag' sites on the web that they want to remember.

The situation was a little incongorous.  I was speaking at the TFPL stand.  I had a screen connected to the internet via a laptop.  The laptop iself sat out of view in the coat cupboard behind the stand.  I didn't have a keyboard to drive the laptop.  Richard Pinder, our director of consultancy, perched himself on the rucksacks, handbags and corporate brochures in the coat cupboard to navigate the laptop around Del.icio.us while I called instructions through the wall of the stand.  We were like two halves of a pantomime horse.

This incongruity illustrated to me two things that I really like about folksonomy.

The first is that you don't have to use the right word to describe things.

I asked Richard to take us to http://del.icio.us/tag/folksonomy .  He missed the 'k' out of folksonomy.  We went to http://del.icio.us/tag/folsonomy. So we saw everything that had been saved to Del.icio.us with the tag 'folsonomy'.  And we still found a page of useful resources about folksonomies.  Because the people who tagged those resources when they saved them to Del.icio.us had made the same spelling mistake as Richard.

The second is that folksonomies help you find out more about people you know. 

I asked the audience to call out the name of their favourite band.  A young lady said 'Razorlight'.  We went to  http://del.icio.us/tag/Razorlight.  We looked down the list of people who had tagged things.  One username leaped out at me.  'Lets look at CharliePinder, I told the audience through the microphone,  My colleague, Richard Pindar is behind the screen, its probably his brother''. 

We went to Charlie Pinder's page of del.icio.us bookmarks.  An interesting one:  he's used tags like 'llama' 'lemur' 'seal'.   The door of the coat cupboard opened.  Richard emerged to make an announcement to the throng:  'It is my brother- he signed Razorlight!'.

We were still shaking our heads about it the next day.  I did a ten minute demonstration of a folksonomy and my boss found his brother. What are the chances against that happening?