Tags

 

 

Tagging is enormously important. The tagger benefits from being able to find things in the web haystack, as well as to see what others are looking at. The potential for collaboration is enormous, as is the power of in-house tagging. People have shown again and again that they are unwilling to use cumbersome classification schemes that give them nothing in return.

 

A recent IBM white paper notes, "Tagging has recently acquired popularity as a lightweight and flexible approach to classifying information. Tagging enables individuals to use whatever terms they think are appropriate to describe or help them recall a resource without the burden of selecting a category from a known taxonomy. It has been applied in a variety of applications ranging from desktop applications for organizing photos (F-Spot 5) to web email systems (Gmail 6). Tagging becomes most compelling when it is used in a collaborative environment, and tags from different people can be aggregated and combined. This approach has been used to manage bookmarks (Del.icio.us), images (Flickr) and products (Amazon.com)" (The white paper goes on to discuss tagging people in order to create directories; you are what you read & write.)

 

A participant in Unworkshop2 wrote: "Del.icio.us - delicious! Really one of the most useful things I learned in the unworkshop. Being able to organise pages of interest under different tags, not just one single bookmark, helps to find exactly the information required in a certain moment. And being able to use my bookmarks from every computer with a internet connection is even better! Also a tool that I started to use regularly!"

 

Jon Udell screencast on Delicious: excellent

 

TagJag from Chris Pirillo.

 

Beth Kanter on tags

 

Pew Internet Project: tags

 

tag tutorials

 

Us.ef.ul

 

tools

 

Picking Up Where Search Leaves Off (Business Week)

 

Folksonomies: Tidying Up Tags is a bit academic but presents the arguments pro and con.

 

13 reasons to use tags in your blog

 

A social analysis of tagging (or how tagging transforms the solitary browsing experience into a social one)

 

This evening someone in a discussion group I've participating in talked of keeping databases of links because bookmarks just didn't do it any more. My reply:

I've dumped "Favorites" because I, too, use many different browsers on different machines. But also because of link rot. And mostly because bookmarks are static, a holdover from the age when things seemed permanent. (I think everything in our world is in motion, sometimes oozing but never stock still). Hence, tags.

A tag utility like Delicious is a mystery the first time you encounter it. (Or the second, third, fourth, etc., for most of us.) But that's because people use the wrong metaphor. Think of Delicious as shared bookmarks.

With Delicious (or its brethren; it's a world of mimicry), you not only create and label your own bookmark collection, you get to see how many other people linked to the same thing, and then you get to peer over their shoulder and see what else they tagged.

 

Listing books that have been important to me over the last 12 months was a fun exercise. Being able to look at your list of books, and Nancy's, and Bronwyn's, and Sarah's, etc., now that would keep me up all night and then some.

 

A few weeks ago in the New York Times Magazine, Kevin Kelly wrote an article obstentiably about publishing but really about the future of knowledge that I will do a disservice but summarizing it as "We're all going to be reading the same book."

Metadata, taxonomy

 

Identify

Identity 2.0 Dick Hardt, great talk

 

Birkman on tagging 1 (David Weinberger, 45 minutes) and and 2

 

The 2007 Horizon Report includes references to its delicious tags, which include the report itself.

 

How to tag