Tags and Folksonomies
Tags = a keyword or label assigned by a user which can identify anything the user wants, e.g.,
- "aboutness" -- or subject headings, topics, etc.
- what kind of a thing the item is, e.g., article, blog, book
- who owns it, e.g., OCLC, BBC
- identifying characteristics or qualities, e.g., funny, scary
- self reference, e.g., mycomments, mystuff
- task organization, e.g., to_read, to_do, conference
Folksonomy = folk + taxonomy = a method of categorizing information in a collaborative and decentralized way (a related neologism is Collabulary= collaborative + vocabulary
Tagging
As Joshua Schachter, from del.icio.us, says:
Tagging is basically a way to remember in public.
Tagging is mostly user interface - a way for people to recall things, what they were thinking about when they saved it. Fairly useful for recall, OK for discovery.
Consider it cataloging by the masses.... or an example of "the ignorant perfection of ordinary people" (as James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, calls it).
The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging -- a Dec. 7, 2005, blog posting by Ellyssa Kroski, a reference librarian at Columbia University (USA)-- is one of the best discussions of tagging and folksonomies.
"Today, users are adding metadata and using tags to organize their own digital collections, categorize the content of others and build bottom-up classification systems. The wisdom of crowds, the hive mind, and the collective intelligence are doing what heretofore only expert catalogers, information architects and website authors have done."
"While top-down taxonomies utilize a controlled vocabulary which is exclusionary by nature, folksonomies include everyone’s vocabulary and reflect everyone’s needs without cultural, social, or political bias. Because folksonomies include alternative views together with popular ones, they present a unique opportunity to discover “long tail” interests. The long tail, a phrase first discussed by Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine, consists of the interests of the minority that lie at the “tail” end of a power law, or statistical distribution, which charts the most popular topics. When combined, these non-mainstream, or niche interests far outnumber the popular ones."
"We are on the cusp of an exciting new stage of Web growth in which users provide both meaning and a means of finding through tagging."
As Chris Armstrong said on his blog info NeoGnostic:
"Do not under-estimate the power of the people - the power of social information management; tagging information is messy and uncontrolled, but it works. Do not under-estimate the power of the actual data to beat the metadata - the catalogue; more and more major digitization projects mean a vast searchable mass of text to search!"
Tags and Intelligence
Tags are for remembering, not for sorting... They are most useful for the person who tagged the resources -- which relates to Roger Schank's theory of intelligence, expounded in his __Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence__ (1990/1995), foreword by Gary Saul Morson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Series title: Rethinking theory, a book I keep returning to in thinking about tagging as well as cataloging (yes, the librarian kind).
Here's an excerpt from the foreword by Gary Saul Morson, summarizing Schank's argument:
What enables ... people to respond intelligently? The answer, for Schank, is that they have previously mulled over their experiences and labeled them in multiple interesting ways.
From a sequence of experiences they have constructed a narrative; they have reflected on this narrative and found a number of ways in which it is significant; and in so doing, their memory has attached several labels to the story, which allow them to recall the story when another narrative suggests similar labels. Once the earlier story is recalled, these people can reflect on pertinent comparisons with the current situation. Present wisdom depends on earlier indexing.
In effect, then the real moment of intelligence occurs not (or not only) when one is reminded of the pertinent story, but when the pertinent story was stored in memory. Intelligence occurs earlier. It is closely related to good indexing.
Re Schank, see also:
Entry on EDGE.ORG, The Third Culture
Entry in Wikipedia
His \"Engines For Education\" hyper-book
Socratic Arts, his company
Social Tagging
...favorite websites
(aka Social Bookmarking)
Social bookmarking, when you get right down to it though, is just a form of miniaturized blogging about a single web resource...
-- Christopher Harris on his blog
-- del.icio.us
viewed as a "distributed classification system"
also called "collaborative web tagging"
-- See also populicio.us for most popular del.icio.us sites of all time.
-- Thumblicious
is a new way to browse the internet, by displaying screenshots of the most popular sites from del.icio.us.
-- StumbleUpon
Ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages which friends and like–minded stumblers have liked.
-- de.lirio.us
Social Bookmarking, Tagging, Blogging & Notes. Mmmmmm, Notes.
-- Simpy
Simpy is a social bookmarking service. With Simpy, you can save, tag and search your own bookmarks and notes or browse and search other users' links and tags.
...pieces of text and webpages
(aka Social Bookmarking +)
-- Furl
lets you save anything you see in your browser.
-- Spurl.net
is a free on-line bookmarking service and search engine. It allows you to store and quickly access again all the interesting pages you find on the web from any Internet connected computer.
-- Esnips-- allows you to snip, store and share anything you like.
Tag everything.
-- My Web 2.0
Move beyond bookmarks
- Never lose a web page again
- Save all the pages you like
- Save all the pages you like (exact copies, not just links)
- Search My Web to instantly "re-find" your saved pages
- Share pages with friends and colleagues
...photographs and images
-- Flickr-- the most popular program for sharing photographs and tagging them
-- Flickr Related Tag Browser "lets you surf Flickr's 'tag space'. Flickr tags are keywords used to classify images. Each tag has a list of 'related' tags, based on clustered usage analysis."
...books
Tag the books you read or want to read -- in effect creating your own booklists or cataloging your own library
-- LibraryThing
is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. Because everyone catalogs together, you can also use LibraryThing to find people with similar libraries, get suggestions from people with your tastes and so forth.
-- Reader2 (squared)
IDEA: How to use with students to collect/share book reviews
...music
last.fm
Tag your music.
...news items
digg
With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.
Read More and Explore...
extisp.icio.us
Gives you a random textual scattering of a user's tags, sized according to the number of times that they've used each of them, and leaves you to draw your own insights from the overlapping entrails. Try "librarytails".
The Year in Tags -- a Dec. 22, 2005, blog posting by Gene Smith, which highlights tags and their development and press over the course of the year.
Conversation with David Weinberger and Jimmy Wales
From Nascent, a good overview of structure of tagging
-- Blog posting on 'Tagging Bookmarks with del.icio.us for Educators' on Emily's World.
How del.icio.us can be used as a shared research facility for a class -- supplemented with a wiki
Action Ideas, or, why not try....?
Help students learn to tag or "catalog" their own information for optimum usefulness and retrieval? Help them develop -- or become aware of -- their own tags and how they reflect how they see the world (and their own information/narrative landscape). To practice 'tagging' things -- which gets into labelling, note-taking, and creating mnemonics -- all useful skills for students to practice.
Encourage students to set up their own personal bookmarking account (e.g., on del.icio.us) to track resources for their school work.
Have students play the ESP Game -- which allows two people to practice tagging the same image at the same time -- can they read each other's mind?
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