Tagging is Coming…
I have been raving about tagging for a while (in life not in blog) but I thought it time to share this with you all to upskill/share quick smart.
Before I do - what is a tag? [skip if you know].
A tag is "a simple category name. People can categorize their posts, photos, and links with any tag that makes sense". (Technorati)
I would also call it a keyword.
For instance, this post will be tagged/catagorised "internet" "change" "technology" and possibly "fun". That jmeans that in addition to sitting on the home page today, anyone going to any of those catagories will see this entry in there as well.
What is great about tagging in my mind is that it is more intuitive, offering the opportunity to organise information in a way more akin to our brains - we don’t store things in one section, we have them at various levels in many catagories. [this is why I can't file].
The cool thing about tagging is that in offering such a dynamic way to organize and search, that is bottom-up, it offers a lot of scope for collaboration! Because tagging is done in real time, organised by us, humans, and is easy to share!
Think of the game tag - once one person is done it is tag, you’re it - over to the next person…
I will write more but in the meantime would like to recommend you point your nose in the direction of websites incorporating tagging and bottom up organizing/catagorisation:
-
http://www.tagsonomy.com/ - blog about tagging
http://www.connotea.org/code - academic tagging - free online reference service for scientists thanks to Nature -
http://del.icio.us social bookmarking - track your internet searches, annotate them, share the information (see also Furl)
-
www.technorati.com tracks blogsphere; utilises tags
- www.flickr.com - photo sharing site using tags. (see also www.iciclelanding.com)
- http://wists.com social shopping
-
I am also going to install a tag cloud on here shortly. Just as soon as I work out how.
-
I find I am always quite ahead of the game in knowledge but not necessarily in implementation eg having a blog took 2 years…want to get beyond that.
-
I love the concept of tagging. I love that it isn’t linear! I love that it is dynamic! Morever as I wade in the water of new organisational forms (we need them, we don’t seem to organise for the world we live in…) tagging seems to offer a tiny peek into what’s to come. So does wikipedia…more on this later.
-
McLuhan’s ghost stirs.
This isn’t just for geeks by the way - Amazon has added tagging into its offering. And I expect this to move into business in a greater way, along with wiki’s and blogs and other collaboration/information sharing tools. Email is, as my friend Marge highlights, extremely primative in terms of communication, not and time consuming.
End notes:
Subscribe to think talk walk
November 30th, 2005 at 9:58 am
problem with tagging - only bottom up…but it is the beginning of what is to come.
November 30th, 2005 at 1:14 pm
Hi Nat,
Thanks for these links about tagging. I was thrilled to go through them today. I was particularly interested in Connotea, edited by the Nature group, that I navigate daily online. I registered to Connotea and it’s a nice paradigm (even if after a quick test it appears somewhat cumbersome to use). On the tagging blog I was delighted to read the interviews of David Weinberger ( del.icio) and Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia). I find Wikipedia more interesting because it is a way to organize an information already digested whereas Connotea regroups relatively raw scientific information. I think that another task is to be able to access an information already processed (learned and in fact understood) at a personal or group level. That’s what the companies inxight and intellisophic are trying to do. Have a look at those links (watch the flash demo at inxight) and tell me what you think. I tend to think intuitively that the inxight approach combined with a Wikibook concept and tagging capabilities would be to develop for any issue in particular in the medical field.
Well, have a good night.
Jerome
http://www.inxight.com/
http://www.intellisophic.com/aboutus/index.php
http://www.montague.com/review/myths.html
November 30th, 2005 at 3:28 pm
[...] inding myself more attracted to symbols and signs, and ways to catagorise them: semiotics, tags, folksonomy…language. I am realising also that in addition to di [...]
November 30th, 2005 at 9:32 pm
One of the other problems with taggs and blogs in my head is that they are ‘flat’ ie 2D…even tag clouds which i will shortly install, that have a ‘heat’ map and thus display larger letters for more oft reported on elements aren’t sufficient…I want something spherical!