Collaboration: Information Sharing: Tags & Tagging

From Web2forDev

Tagging - Christian Kreuz

The web can be overwhelming. It can give us a sense of information of overload.

Social bookmarking is a response to that problem. It helps you find relevant information by networking you with people who are interested in the same issues as you are. It places you in a community of relevant people. It's all about sharing.

Web 1 (illustrated in the world bank gateway), provided categories of content selected by information specialists. Content was then organised under those headings.

(exercise - all participants asked to write down five words that describe themes that interest them. Words are called out, and others stand up if they have the same words written down. Each word selected, has a number of other people standing up to share an interest in that theme).

All those selecting the word 'agriculture' can see that there are others who share that interest.

Challenge of tagging - how to keep tags consistent.

http://del.icio.us - a website owned by yahoo that is a meta level tagging resource. A site for saving and tagging your resources, and sharing them with others.

Tag Cloud - a list of tags that people are using with differently sized words representing the popularity of different tags.

http://afrigator.com - a content aggregator for content from Africa - quickly shows what tags have been most popularly used in the recent past.

'Comments and questions' How do we manage tagging in the multi-lingual context?

THis is a problematic area that needs bridging technology to cope with.

This is where the semantic web comes in. It models knowledge in a more powerful way so that labels can be used to describe content using synonyms. This should help to link similar tags and other-language versions of tags.

In our internal office wiki, we have a field for tags each time we add a new page. Is that tagging or social bookmarking?

Tagging is a feature of social bookmarking.

How is tagging related to meta tags that go into web page development?

Meta tags are tools for search engines use to rate your site in indexing search results. Tags that other people associate with our site can help us establish relevance of other tags to our site.

Tagging allows for a social taxonomy to evolve that brings the wisdom of the community together. But who is the community?

If you don't use tagging, then you are marginalising your content. We also need to be aware of the privacy implications of tagging. Commercial applications are fully aware of the commercial opportunities of tagging.

Delicious can help us as content producers to understand better how our content is being produced. YOu can see how many people have tagged your site, and what they say about it.