Week Six: March 9-13
Class Session 1: March 9, 3-4pm - Room 774
Class Session 2: March 12, 3-4pm - Room 774
"Playing 'tag' on the web."
Web sites:
This week we look at how 'tagging', the informal classification of information, has made browsing and searching for information easier and more natural.
Tags are essentially metadata to describe something online. It could be a blog post, an image, a video or almost anything else online. The idea is to provide a non-hierarchical way to label information to enable discovery through searching and browsing.
A unique feature of tags is that there is no strict, controlled vocabulary - you can use whatever word you want! From one perspective, this is very powerful because you can use whatever words make sense to you, with each word becoming part of your own personal ontology. However, problems can arise in cases where interpretation differs from one word to another. An example of this is the word "orange" - does that word mean the color or the fruit? Other problems are in cases with context and spelling. For example, "car" and "cars" may refer to images about cars, but they may not be related in the taxonomy because the system does not account for permutations of a word.
However, despite these problems, tagging has enabled people to browse and search for information in ways that they never could before. Previously, users had to rely on search engines to produce relevant results or they had to know where the information they wanted was already. With tags, not only can a quick snapshot (called a 'tag cloud') describe the information, a user can click on a tag in a tag cloud to link to other information relevant to that tag.
This image is what the "Web 2.0" tag cloud looks like (wikipedia.com):
In this example, if this cloud tag was on a blog post about Web 2.0, clicking on "RSS" would link you to other posts about RSS feeds. They might not be relevant to Web 2.0, but part of the idea of tag clouds is to share and explore and see what's out there!
Activities:
A powerful use of this application is on the website Flickr which we looked at over the past few weeks.
If you've already created a Flickr account and have uploaded some photos, great. If not, thats where you want to start. Check out "Week Three - Photos".
Now that we have some photos online, we want to add some tags to them!
Select your photo that you want to tag, and click on the "Add a Tag". In my example, I used an image that I took of the bread aisle after our snow day. Now, go ahead and type in a word or two that describes your picture. There's no wrong answer, so just enter some words that summarize the photo for you. Click "Add".. and you're done!
From the Flickr "You" menu, select "Your Tags". In the central part of the screen, you'll see your very own cloud tag! If you've tagged any of your images before, you may see that some of your tags are larger than others, meaning that you've used that tag more than the others. This is how your tag cloud adds emphasis to your more popular tags.
Click on any of your tags and you'll see all the images that you've tagged with that tag. Now.. its time to check out the power of tags. Click on "See all public content..." and you'll be brought to all the pictures that have the same tag!
Now we're going to take a look at Technorati, the Internet search engine for blogs. The first thing that you'll want to do is create a Technorati profile. One you have that, you can then "claim" your blog, which simply means that you want to add your blog to the "blogosphere". However, even if you don't claim your blog, it will probably still be indexed into the blogosphere, but it might take longer and you won't have the "extra" exposure that claiming provides.
Also by claiming, you'll be able to use the HTML that allows your blog to display special Technorati controls which allow your blog to be favorited by people who like your blog.
After creating a Technorati profile and logging in, access your profile by selecting your username from the top right menu. Then, in the "My Account" screen, select the "Claimed Blogs" menu item. In the box, enter your blog address and click "Begin Claim".
You'll now be able to enter some information about your blog, including some tags which will help people with similar interests find your blog.
Now, when you view your "Claimed Blogs" tab in "My Account", you can click on the tags you selected for your blog and view other blogs with the same tags!
“Delicious” is the site for social bookmarking. It allows you to access your bookmarks from anywhere on the web but in the context of social networking and folksonomies, it lets you share your bookmarks with everyone else on Delicious. This creates another alternative to traditional search engines in that it can often render more relevant results when you want to find web sites on a specific topic.
You don’t need to create a Delicious profile to see what people are tagging the most, but if you choose to create a profile you can use it to store your bookmarks and share them as well. When you add your bookmarks, you can then tag them so that other people will be able to find them. You can then see how many other people are using Delicious to store that bookmark and then browse their bookmarks to see if there are any web sites on their list you might find valuable.
Try it out, you might never Google again! Well, that’s not likely but as least this is an alternative.
Thanks for your interest in tagging and social bookmarking!
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