PUBLIC MARKS with tags article & tagging

Cataloging how to, how is and history

... makes it popular) Thomas Van Der Wal: Explaining and Showing Broad and Narrow Folksonomies Adam Weinroth: Tag Team Michael Wexler: I hate tags , I still hate tagging , I continue to despise tagging Mimi Yen: Hierarchy Versus Facets Versus Tags

I was thinking about bookmarks the other night and about how much they suck and about how much I hate them.

To investigate what words and phrases people associate with Web 2.0, I took a close look at two popular Web 2.0-ish articles and noted what tags people stored them under in del.icio.us. The first post was Adam Rifkin's fantastic Weblications. It currently has 99 people linking to it on del.icio.us and here is an excel chart showing the top tags:

* Misspelt tags (e.g., libary, libray) * Badly encoded tags, such as unlikely compound word groupings (e.g.,TimBernersLee) * Tags that do not follow convention in issues such as case and number; singular versus plural form (e.g., apple, apples) * Personal tags that are without meaning to the wider community (e.g., mydog) * Single-use tags that appear only once in the database. (e.g., billybobsdog)

1. Introduction A folksonomy is a type of distributed classification system. It is usually created by a group of individuals, typically the resource users. Users add tags to online items, such as images, videos, bookmarks and text. These tags are then shared and sometimes refined. A general review of social bookmarking tools, one popular use area of folksonomies, was given in the April edition of D-Lib [1]. In the article the authors elaborate on the approach taken by social classification systems and the motivators behind tagging. They write, "...tags are just one kind of metadata and are not a replacement for formal classification systems such as Dublin Core, MODS, etc.... Rather, they are a supplemental means to organise information and order search results."

In order to understand how we can make tags more searchable it is important to understand users and why they submit certain tags. At this time, little is known about the decision-making process behind tag selection, and quantitative data is relatively scarce. One useful approach might be to examine users' motivations when adding tags, see why they decide on particular words, observe how many tags they add and compare how the same items are classified by different users. It might also be helpful to see how feedback affects tag use and how users modify tags in the light of the behaviour of others. However, such studies take time and resources.

If you've been to a technology event recently, especially one with a high concentration of digerati, you may have seen someone stand up and tell everyone what the event's Flickr tag is.

__ D-Lib Magazine; April 2005; Volume 11 Number 4; ISSN 1082-9873; Social Bookmarking Tools (I); A General Review; Tony Hammond, Timo Hannay, Ben Lund, and Joanna Scott; Nature Publishing Group; {t.hammond, t.hannay, b.lund, j.scott}@nature.com

__ D-Lib Magazine; April 2005; Volume 11 Number 4; ISSN 1082-9873; Social Bookmarking Tools (I); A General Review; Tony Hammond, Timo Hannay, Ben Lund, and Joanna Scott; Nature Publishing Group; {t.hammond, t.hannay, b.lund, j.scott}@nature.com

TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feeds you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. Clicking on the tag's link will display a list of all the article abstracts associated with that keyword.