Metamedia

Rumors of Wordpress as a CMS

No, I have not disappeared. I am testing the contention that in order to survive, blogs must have continual content. I actually gained a couple of subscribers in my two month hiatus.

Actually, I have been building and testing an Instructional Technology support site with many CMS qualities to it, on the Wordpress platform. It has forced me to come face-to-face with the innards of WP and its database design and code, though fortunately, much of the grunt work has been done by a very able workstudy student, and much of our content will be ported from our internal support wiki.

Conclusions: WP is not ready for prime time as a CMS. Not at all.

It is still a very post-centric beast, masquerading as a content management system. The so-called CMS like features added to WP core (tagging, pages) are all incomplete and lacking in some respect or another.

However, at almost every turn, the WP Community has rescued WP from this situation.

An amazing array of plugins cover almost every current deficiency of WP. 

To wit: Tagging, Categories, Searching are all post centric and don't cover Pages in WP 2.3 series. How can you have a CMS without that? Fortunately, we have been saved by some very nice plugins:

• Dan Cameron's Search Everything
• Amaury Balmer's Simple Tags
• and Pixline's Category Page

which make up for WP's core lacks. Without these, the claim of WP is CMS worthy are ludicrous. Imagine (in the analog world) being able to search your day-timer for information but not your file cabinets.

One day, WP will catch up: it always does. But it does so because its community has been there ahead of it.

We have added Forms management, LDAP authentication (very stable so far), and an Events calendar, too, as well as plugins to ease the posting and playing of audio and video, and a few eye-candy plugins.

Now, we are filling up with data from our department wiki, collected over two years of work. This means sifting selectively for what users will find valuable. The work continues. When ready, I will post the URL.

Wear A Tag Cloud To Work

This is so funny, I have to borrow the phrase "Planned Obsolescence" from KF to describe it:

You can now buy a personalized text or tag cloud tee shirt online at Snapshirts. You can choose a text cloud from a (very selected) list of authors, or do your own custom text or tag cloud based on your blog or indeed any web page at all. There are mouse pads, too.

Yes, but if you do make a tee shirt of a blog, or for that matter an type of tag cloud, it will of course be instantly obsolete, since tag clouds change (unlike text clouds.)

Just like a book.

So, we are fixing a tag cloud in a Literate way ! We are fixing the text at a particular time with ink fixed on plant fiber, and that object will be out there and unable to participate in further changes of the chosen text.

Guess you'll have to buy the second edition ;)  There is still life in the planned obsolescence business model after all.

But of course now that it is fixed, it can be logoized. Imagine the possibilities. Um, could I get that in a bumper sticker, too?  How about on a flag?

So, which should I go with ? A text cloud of my favorite author, showing I am hip to Web 2.0 but still rooted in Literate mode, or a tag cloud of my blog, knowing it will be obsolete, but is that okay because I can take an ironic stance to it ?

Anyway, the cloud generator works fine -- and you can tweak the words and change the color. I even made a cloud of my staff home page which has my bio on it.

So, wear your cloud to work.

Both Sides Now

When is a tag not a tag ?

When it is part of a text cloud rather than a tag cloud.

The term text cloud, which I borrow from Joe Lamantia's article "Text Clouds: A New Form of Tag Cloud?", is a very useful one, because is shows us that the ONLY thing a text cloud and tag cloud have in common is the style of the visualization, the representation. The underlying represented is quite different.

Both of the following are mistakenly called by the same term, tag cloud, but the first is a text cloud, and the second is a tag cloud.

Image:	Source:
	State of the Union
	PennTags

A text cloud will show me the unchanging visual lexical distribution based on author data; basically it's just a visual form of a good old fashioned word frequency index. It is controlled by one person: the author. It does not vary.

A tag cloud will show me the changeable conceptual visual distribution of the audience metadata, that is, how many many individuals have categorized and conceptualized the text. It can and should vary both over the concepts of the individual contributors, and also should vary through time as the concepts of the audience change as the audience changes.

Text Cloud	Tag Cloud
Data	Metadata
Text	Comment
Author	Audience
Lexical	Conceptual
Fixed	Fluid
Invariant	Stable Core & Individual Variants

See also my other posts on tags: To Tag or Not To Tag and The Persistence of Tags.

Some further tag example sites:

• A nice list at Joe Lamantia's post
• Culture Cloud, a site with clouds as a core metaphor
• Intro to the IBM Many Eyes tool
• Wordworks post in search of the perfect tag cloud
• One of my favs: Microsoft history

Text cloud creators:

• Tag Crowd
• Text Tag Cloud
• Chirag Mehta's Tagline Generator

Also, don't forget there are books:  one of the great classics in this are is Edward Tufte's famous The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

To Tag or Not to Tag - That is the Question

What is the most common word in Hamlet ?

Fear, death, murder ? Hamlet?

For example, consider this example of not a Tag Cloud, but rather a Text Cloud, of Hamlet, specifically the public domain version of the First Folio available at Project Gutenberg.  It says the most common word is 'Hamlet'.  Doh.

All is not well; I doubt some foul play.

But the data in that cloud is skewed: it treats the play as a script, since it includes as data the stage directions and all the dialog speaker names, which mean that Proper Names will be a much much higher percentage of usage.

In fact, in the experience of the play in a theater, the audience never hears those words or the stage directions: they are theatrical metadata, as every playwright and script writer knows.

So I took the same Gutenberg text used to create the cloud above (which is a transcription of the first folio, not a modernized text), stripped out all the dialog slugs and stage directions, and got this cloud (via TagCrowd) of the top 100 items instead:

 

'tis againe against away beleeue body comes dead death deere denmarke doe done doth downe drinke eare earth england euen eyes faire father feare friends giue god goe hamlet hast hath haue head heare heart heauen hee heere himselfe hold horatio ile indeed king laertes leaue life liue looke lord loue mad madnesse man marry matter meanes mine mother nature nay neuer night nor nothing oh once ophelia owne players poore pray queene seene selfe shall shew sir sonne soule speake speech spirit sweet sword thee thinke thou though thoughts thy till true vp vpon vs whose words world yet

created at TagCrowd.com

Haue, shall, thou, thy. 'tis, vpon, vs, selfe, doe...

As you can see, the most common word is 'haue' which is a typographical anachronism present in the text since it is a transcription from the First Folio. Like the terms shall, thou, thy, these are words that would ordinarily be left out of text cloud analysis as common words.

Lord

Is Hamlet especially prayerful?  No. Hamlet is a prince, his mother is the queen, his father was the king, and just about everybody in the play is either royalty speaking, or speaking to royalty. The high presence of the Lord in Hamlet is because most of characters are Lords, and as a play it is filled with direct address, is it not so, My Lord?

Hamlet, Father, Loue, Mother

Aye, there's the rub.

You could of course, take a spelling regularized version of the play and clean up the distribution. You could also adjust the word stop list to include or exclude certain terms.

Here is what happens if you clean up the text from a regularized text, then go to Tag Crowd and choose the "shakespeare" word filter which turns many of the anachronisms into their common modern equivalents so they are treated as ordinary words and many disappear from the list:

 

against away bear believe better blood body clown comes command daughter dead dear death denmark done drink ear earth else england eyes fair faith farewell father fear fit friends ghost god gone grief hamlet head hear heard heart heaven himself hold horatio itself king lady laertes leave life light lord love madness majesty man marry matter means mother murder nature nay night noble nothing once ophelia players poor pray purpose queen question rest seen since son soul speak speech spirit state sweet sword thanks therefore think though thoughts tongue true watch welcome whose wind words world young yourself youth

created at TagCrowd.com

A much more insightful text-cloud, don't you think?

You could do other things to manipulate the data as well. I leave that to you as your homework.

So beware, as alway, the statistics, one of the three types of lies. Just because it's visual and thus more perusasive -- and maybe much more insightful as well -- does not mean that we must abandon our critical facilities.

Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun, it shines everywhere.

The Persistent of Tags

About the persistence over time of tags, from an academic perspective.

The Skeptical Librarian: 

One of the problems with tags and folksonomy is that they will not preserve a terribly useful legacy for access.  Terms come and go in usage faster than ever. To rely only on tag clouds will mean information will be harder to find in any kind of precise way in 10 years.

Tagger:

For an individual, the terms are whatever you tag them as and the terms will change for you as you grow, but they do reach a pretty quickly diminishing limit (as Marlow, Naaman, et al have found) as a tagger reaches a mature level in tagging practice.

Of course, between any two random taggers, their tag sets may vary markedly, but overall, an object reaches a stable proportion of tag representation after only about 100 markings (Golder and Huberman 2006), so it doesn't take many users tagging to get a very useful and stable core tag set.

So I don't see tag distribution change as a negative but a huge positive: objects get additionally tagged as the audience conceptualizations of them change, so they will remain pertinent over time, making objects EASIER to find.

But they will also have historical depth, unlike say, the Dewey decimal or Library of Congress time fixed taxonomies, which have historical stasis (rather than depth), and hence pertinence drift.

However, there is discussion about "tag decay," the obsolescence of tags. But that is simply a property of the type of data it is and should be handled with standard data management practices.

Pruning old or irrelevant tags is (well, should be/will be) a standard data management practice. Golder and Huberman's findings about the stability of the central core of tags is very important for our situation -- cleaning out one, a hundred, or even a thousand graduating students' personal tags will not adversely impact the central tag core for an item.

For example: As a student, I would tag a library journal article with tags for the class, term and Professor I was doing the research for. If the article was used in that class by that Prof year after year, more students might take this way and so the tags will stay. If not, then the tags will diminish as the old student data is cleaned out and disappear as they should.

Finally, I don't believe anyone is seriously advocating the replacement of standard controlled vocabularies by tagging and folksonomy.  In fact, the argument that tagging will replace standard taxonomic metadata is a straw man in such arguments. 

Rather, the purpose of tagging and the reason for its incredibly swift adoption and growth  is that it is  filling the big niche between controlled conceptual taxonomies and brute force lexical search. All three are complementary tools.

Sources:

Marlow, Naaman, et al. 2006
http://www.danah.org/papers/Hypertext2006.pdf

Golder and Huberman 2006
http://jis.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/32/2/198

Tag the Academic Blog List

Michael Roy of Wesleyan University has started to accumulate a list of academic blogs used in colleges and universities, by using del.ico.us tags.

He is using the tag BloggingAcademicExamples to create a list of academic oriented and by academic blogs.

He also has created these tags for similar academic uses of social software:

• WikiAcademicExamples
• PodcastingAcademicExamples
• SocialbookmarkingAcademicExamples

If you have or find other examples of blogs being used for courses or by academics that could serve as examples, please tag them accordingly to build up the list.