Tagging Part 3 - Philosphy

As tag clouds come to replace expert taxonomies in common practice, carefully constructed hierarchies vanish. In their place is a flattened world where every idea, at any level, is a topic as worthy as any other. Eight Mile is a topic at the same level as Detroit, which is a topic at the same level as Cities, which is a topic at the same level as United States, and so on.

http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0505a.shtml
Jeffrey Zeldman
May 5th, 2005

The relative importance of various tags was initially defined purely through frequency of use and denoted in tag clouds by size -- more use equated to a larger font size within the cloud. Less frequency of use was denoted by ever decreasing font sizes, thus the fear that important topics could disappear from the blogosphere or at least that their tags would get so small that only folks with magnifying glasses would see them.

One influential blogger may mention another blog in their post. That mention might cause several thousand other bloggers to go to the post and tag it. That in turn might cause several million more bloggers to tag the post for future reading and..... a new star is born. Interest in topics could explode, or appear to explode, but then wane equally quickly.

The second issue mentioned regularly with respect to tagging is navigation.

Folksonomy (also known as collaborative tagging , social classification, social indexing, social tagging, and other names) is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. In contrast to traditional subject indexing, metadata is not only generated by experts but also by creators and consumers of the content. Usually, freely chosen keywords are used instead of a controlled vocabulary.[1] Folksonomies became popular on the Web around 2004 with social software applications such as social bookmarking or annotating photographs. Websites that support tagging and the principle of folksonomy are referred to in the context of Web 2.0 because participation is very easy and tagging data is used in new ways to find information. For example, tag clouds are frequently used to visualize the most used tags of a folksonomy. The term folksonomy is also used to denote only the set of tags that are created in social tagging.

Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy
Nov. 26, 2007

Flickr is already beginning to solve this problem by applying more traditional hierarchies to their newest search tools, primarily the world map now available on their website. This isn't a perfect solution as it still depends on user generated tags, but it does make searching for pictures of a specific geographic area much more quickly.

The graphic above is from Flickr this morning -- 2.2 million photos geotagged this month. Below is a video about a use for all of those geographically tagged photos, a software called Seadragon.



Photosynth takes navigation to a new level.

Lisa

List of Open Content Resources

This list came from one Rhonda Epper of CCCOnline is compiling:


Open Content Resources:
MERLOT: http://www.merlot.org
Hewlett Foundation OER initiatives: http://www.hewlett.org/Programs/Education/OER/openEdResources.htm
MIT OpenCourseWare: http://ocw.mit.edu
Carnegie Mellon: http://www.cmu.edu/oli/
Harvard University Library Open Collections Program: http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww/
Rice University Connexions: http://cnx.rice.edu/
Morgue File - public images: http://www.morguefile.com/
Wikipedia.org: http://www.wikipedia.org
Wikibooks.org http://www.wikibooks.org
National Repository for Online Courses: http://www.nrocnetwork.org
CCCOnline's Custom Hippocampus: http://www.hippocampus.org/myHippo/?user=myccco
Internet Archive's "Moving Images" collection: http://www.archive.org/details/movies
Prelinger Archives: http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger
Free videos produced by various PBS stations around the country: http://www.learner.org/resources/

From Jesse Stommel and Sean Law's Open Content ENG 121 course:
Etext library: http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/s/shelley/mary/s53f/
Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/
Full etext with MP3 files: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=6542
Brevity - An online magazine of creative non-fiction: www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/index.htm
Plagiarism Article Database: http://www.web-miner.com/plagiarism
Hpyerdictionary: http://www.hyperdictionary.com
Wikibook on Rhetoric and Composition: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Rhetoric_and_Composition
The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing: http://nutsandbolts.washcoll.edu

Lisa

Tagging

Tagging deserves its own post beyond the incredibly handy programs like Del.icio.us.

If you use Web 2.0 sites like Flickr or gmail you are probably tagging. Tagging at its simplest gives individual users a way to organize web-sites and content for their own purposes. If you are a gmail user for example, you can now tag the mail you receive instead of file it. Because you can give a single email multiple tags you can "file" that email under password, conference, and education instead of having to choose just one location. When you need the email again you can find it if you search under any of those terms.

Social web-sites expand this concept. Try visiting http://technorati.com/. Technorati searches and compiles web-content by tag and organizes it so you can search for relevant (maybe) content. I visited this morning and searched on yarn.
The first thing you might notice is that Technorati found almost 58,000 mentions of the word yarn, which might strike you as a little scary. It then gives you links to many of the blogs and videos which mention yarn today. Technorati searchs blogs, but also searches social media - photos, videos, and music. There is a tag cloud on the home page that shows you which tags are most frequently used at that moment.

I was there this morning - Britney Spears is #2 on the list, much scarier than 58,000 hits on yarn (left). Wii is apparently really the hot Christmas present this year - number 7 on the list.

Flickr (the photo sharing site) users also tag their photos. Flickr has a new feature - they take those photos with a geographic tag and organize them on a searcheable map. This essentially organizes tags in a traditional, hierarchical manner for the benefit of users:
It's still not a perfect search tool -- users tag photos with words they will remember, not with words users traditional search on. In my case I wanted a picture of the Black Canyon outside on Montrose, CO. A search on Black Canyon found the one in Idaho (hadn't heard of that one before). I had to search on Montrose to find a picture of the Black Canyon I was interested in.

This is a picture someone named Ken Lund took and posted.






The trouble I had searching for the Black Canyon of the Gunnison brings up a critical issue with tags - they aren't hierarchical or organized in any traditional sense, other than frequency of use. Flickr's use of the map has begun to address this - you can look for North America, then US, then Colorado, a more traditional search path. The taggers though (that's all of us) generally don't have formal training in research methodology, so the accuracy of the tags is .... not necessarily very good.

Tag Clouds shown by sites that utilize tagging and rate media, and thus ideas, by the frequency of the use of a specific tagging term do change the world that we see. Is Brittney Spears really that much more important than Iraq? If your frame of reference is the tag cloud on Technorati she is. Certainly more people are tagging more items with her name than they are with Iraq. Will other critical ideas not get enough tags and so will their tag just shrink in size until they just disappear?

More later.

Lisa

Web-based Bookmarking aka Tagging and Social Bookmarking

Put your cans of spray paint away, we are all mature academics here, so "tagging" in this context means labeling websites with your keyboard. Tagging is a much larger issue than web-based bookmarking, so for the purposes of this blog I am going to take web-based bookmarking first and then expand to tagging and social bookmarking in general.

Long, long ago in the early days of the web if you wanted to save the URL of a website you had to type it into a list you stuck up somewhere safe and secure. A major improvement to that filing method was the bookmark option soon built into most browsers. That has drawbacks also though -- first you have to build appropriately named folders to file those links in and then you have to be able to remember which folder you put the links into. Almost worse, the bookmarks were only saved in one browser on one computer. As we begin to collect more and more computers and more and more browser options the bookmark we want is almost always on the "other" computer, the one you don't have under your fingertips at the moment you need the link.

Social bookmark software services solve both of those problems - they use a semantic tagging process to let you put more than one label on each website, increasing the likelihood you will be able to find it again in a couple of months and they exist online in an account that you can access from every computer everywhere

An example of of a web service that allows you to do this is del.icio.us. To use delicious you sign up for an account, which gives you a place to save URLs of web-sites that interest you. Many browsers will let you download and install a plugin for del.icio.us that allows you to access your account automatically from the browser. In Firefox the plugin looks like this:


The first button opens a tag search feature in your browser (next graphic), the second button opens the tagging window so you can tag the website you are currently accessing (third graphic).







If you do this enough you eventually develop your own tag cloud - set of tags you commonly use. You also contribute to the both general tag cloud and the tag clouds of your friends, thus the name "Social Bookmarking".

On Del.icio.us my list of recent links looks like this:

It's interesting to note that Del.icio.us notes for you how many other users have tagged the same web-site you just tagged.

On Del.icio.us's home page they link you to commonly used tags (this is a tag-cloud):
Tags that I have used that others are also commonly using are highlighted in red. This may be a not-so-subtle attempt to guide tagging semantics or just an interesting piece of social commentary. Tags that are used more often are typically larger than less frequently used tags. Tag clouds like this can be organized in a variety of ways, from size (frequency) to alphabetical to geographical.

Here's a link to a new video from Lee LeFever on Social Bookmarking: http://www.commoncraft.com/bookmarking-plain-english



In the next post we'll look at various web-sites that extensively utilize tagging such as gmail and Flickr.

Lisa