Big business makes poor decisions.....

Seems a couple businesses are trying to use the social web for there corporate means. Firstly, Reed Elsevier officials have admitted that it was a mistake for the STM publisher's marketing division to offer $25 (£15).
Secondly, Habitat have had to apologise for using Hashtags on the Iranian unrest on twitter to direct users to there website.
You got to laugh.

An interesting book out on monday

Thomas Vander Wal releases his book on monday called Understanding Folksonomy: Catalyzing Users to Enrich Information. Most people know Thomas Vander Wal as the inventor of the term Folksonomy. It is well worth getting alongside Gene Smith's Tagging book.

Clay Shirky interview

Clay Shirky of famous Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality and the book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, is interviewed by Richard Wallis over on Panlibus site. Worth a listen (if only I had internet at home......just 16 days to go).

The books I have read......

Well, of late I have heavily reading the web 2.0 stuff. I have read Gene Smith's Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web. If your interested in folksonomies and librarything, its well worth a read. Code is also included as well. Tim Spalding had discussed the book previously.

Librarything and tagging

Tim Spalding over on librarything has a great post called Percent who tag, as a follow up to his other post (When tags work and when they don't: Amazon and LibraryThing)
In it,he says:-
'Here's some data on that issue. I compared the number of books a LibraryThing member has with whether they tag or not. The later is defined as having at least one tag, so it over-represents taggers. But the trend is clear. The more you have to keep track of, the more you tag.'
I really like to tag stuff now (I really like the new feature in blogger for tagging).
The other thing I like about the article is it also engages the user with site (librarything I'm talking about). Some social cataloguing sites forget to engage there users, but not on librarything.

Blogger......I never knew that.....

I just realised that the beta version of blogger allowed to tag (sorry Google, I mean LABEL). I really should take more notice.......