Sunday, December 4, 2005, 2:47:21 PM, Nerissa (TheVideoQueen) wrote: > Why the "LET PEOPLE PICK A CATEGORY" argument will fail: > Not everyone will tag their videos correctly ... > And what about the ambiguous videos? ...
Definately. > POSSIBLE SOLUTION #1: > Let your community regulate itself and ban members for > misbehaving. Use the Craigslist.org model. Allow your visitors to > "flag" the posts. This solution will work, but only in the way that it will > POSSIBLE SOLUTION #2: > Restrict adult category to a separate category requiring > different service agreements and viewership agreements. What worries me about both these approaches is that (despite your mention of "ambiguous videos" above) they both assume that (a) the only thing people are concerned with is "porn", and (b) that somehow there is an objective definition of what "porn" is. Neither of these assumptions really hold up in the wider context of a global internet and varying world cultures. Not that you are the only one to fall foul of this misunderstanding - the much-lauded Yahoo mediaRSS specification embodies the same naive assumptions. May I propose a POSSIBLE SOLUTION #3: STEP 1: informative (rather than evaluative) tagging. Tagging is growing in popularity enormously - everywhere I look on the web these days I tagging systems. This is enormously useful and valuable. However, there is an (IMHO) unfortunatel trend toward "evaluative" rather than "informative" tagging. Evaluative tagging is the kind used by the "watchthis" tag on deli.icio.us, for example. I subscribe to this tag feed, and have seen plenty of things on it that I would not have tagged in that way. Informative tagging on the other hand is the kind that helps a potential audience understand the nature of the content before being exposed to it. Tagging a piece with a location, author, participants, length, format, etc. are a common form of informative tagging, but so would "contains" tags such as "nudity" "sexual violence" "Christian evangelism", "capitalism", "swearing", "flag burning". The advantage of informative tagging is that it allows each viewer to construct his or her own filters appropriate to his or her own culture and views. This avoids the problem of global definitions and allows people to potentially reject anything they don't want to see, be it porn, advertisments, George Bush, or whatever. STEP 2: trust relationships in tagging. Current tagging systems are essentially anonymous and untrusted. The value they have is based generally on weight of numbers. The more people who tag a particular item with a particular tag, the more likely it is assumed to be valid. It might be better (particularly for items with relatively few tags or taggers) if somehow the potential viewer could assign trust levels to particular taggers. If (for example) I really trust Jay Dedman's taste, then I can give his tags more weight than someone I have never encountered. This becomes particularly important when tagging is used to filter out unwanted material. STEP 3: a quarantine process. The problem with tagging as a filter mechanism is that (at present) it's only realistically possible to filter for "positives". I can already ask several services to give me a feed of all items tagged with "java" AND "software" AND "development", for example, but asking for all items NOT tagged with "Microsoft" is crazy talk. The main problem is that there is always a delay between an item appearing and it accumulating enough tags to be useful. Current systems add new items to a feed or category only when an appropriate tag is applied, but an "exclusive" feed that worked in the same way would never add any items. A quarantine process would certainly slow down the immediacy of items appearing in categories and feeds, but could provide a better quality of exclusion. If newly released or discovered items are somehow "quarantined" by filter software until they have accumulated a certain "weight" of tags, then it makes much more sense to consider the idea of selecting all items without certain tags. I'm assuming that this sort of quarantine would be a user option on directory and feed browsing software, to allow users to adjust their own criteria and delays. Comments? -- Frank Carver http://www.makevideo.org.uk ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Most low income households are not online. Help bridge the digital divide today! http://us.click.yahoo.com/I258zB/QnQLAA/TtwFAA/lBLqlB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/videoblogging/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
