Notes and links from the Social Tagging workshop

From ml2sig

Contents 1 Social Tagging Workshop Notes 1.1 Some quick definitions 1.2 About Tagging 1.2.1 Use Stats 1.2.2 Why Tag? 1.2.3 Tagging exercise 1.2.4 Some Library-ish projects that use tagging 1.3 Using del.icio.us and flickr

[edit] Social Tagging Workshop Notes

[edit] Some quick definitions

Tags are user-generated keywords. Tags are typically uncontrolled, though occasionally organizations or groups may encourage the use of a tag (for example we suggest using the tag MLibrary2 when tagging items related to this program)

Tag Cloud is a visual representation of a group of tags. Typically, the most used tags will be darker and larger and the less used tags will be smaller and lighter.

A Folksonomy is basically a user-generated taxonomy. Folksonomies are typically created using tags.

An RSS feed or ATOM feed is just a file that's designed to mimic the basic structure of a web page in a machine-readable format.

We say you subscribe to an RSS feed when you give your feed reader (also called a feed aggregator) the URL of the RSS file for a particular web page, blog, recurring search, news feed, etc. The feed reader (like Google Reader and Bloglines on the web) keeps track of what you've read and what you haven't the same way your email programs lets you know when there's new email by downloading each feed you've subscribed to and checking to see if it's changed every hour or so.

[edit] About Tagging

[edit] Use Stats

“A December 2006 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 28% of internet users -- and 7% on any typical day -- have tagged or categorized online content such as photos, news stories or blog posts.” “A December 2006 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 28% of internet users -- and 7% on any typical day -- have tagged or categorized online content such as photos, news stories or blog posts.” http://pewresearch.org/pubs/402/tagging-play

[edit] Why Tag?

1. Because we can’t catalog or organize everything and we need to think about tapping into the power of the masses (“crowdsourcing”), users are now producer & consumers (“prosumers”).
2. Because language changes quickly
3. You can organize stuff using terms that make sense to you (in turn making retrieval much easier)
4. Enable connections with other users
5. Sharing & Discovery - Looking at other's tags can help you discover more stuff for yourself and (vise versa)
6. Because things can be described in many different ways
7. The downside is that they are often unreliable, ambiguous, overly personal ("favorites")

[edit] Tagging exercise

• Tagging exercise for Suzanne's workshop

[edit] Some Library-ish projects that use tagging

• Ann Arbor District Library's Online Catalog
• Community tagging of museum images: Steve: The Art Museum Social Tagging Project and The Art Museum Community Cataloging Project
• Personal Book Collections using LibraryThing
• Google's Image Labeler matches you with another "player" and you tag images until you both tag it with the same term.

[edit] Using del.icio.us and flickr

See the flickr and social bookmarking resource pages for more information about using these technologies in a library context.