tagging

mediawiki categories are really tags

I have set up a mediawiki which is still in a tentative stage, so using what I call tags allows me to begin adding pages without having any nailed down structure at all yet.

From the word 'categories' used by mediawiki softare you would think they have to be predefined but this is not the case. You can create new ones on the fly, have multiple 'categories' assigned to one page with none being primary, and automatically generate lists of all pages 'categorised' as such. So they really are tags.

Here's my example: http://distributedresearch.net/wiki/index.php/Category:Action_Research

All you have to do is learn the syntax for adding categories to pages which is as simple as this:

[[Category: Action Research]] [[Category: Theory]]

Tagging helps to gather individuals

Flickr

The photo sharing site Flickr offers the possibility for anybody to easily set up a group around any topic you like, but where will the members come from? As an act of facilitation, one source is to subscribe to the RSS of the most appropriate tag(s). Then, whenever relevant new photos pop up in the general stream, you can invite the photographer to submit it to the group, and thus join. It works.

Technorati

"Is that just to help people find your blogpost?"

I think it works in both directions. The tags are also hyperlinks, so anyone reading the blog post can click through and see what some other people are saying about the same topic. I might go back to a post I wrote a dew days ago, click through to technorati and find something interesting which I may then refer to or comment on. So the tagging helps to join in the conversation, which is distributed, loosely connected, often ephemeral but may be contributing to some aspect of community.

Wikis

As wikis develop and grow, tagging the individual pages accurately will make it easier to access the informaton from a variety of viewpoints. For example, a wiki about Paris might have an entry for an Algerian restaurant which then gets tagged both "couscous" and also something which depicts the 6Ëme arrondissement. So tagging gives the community of wiki enthusiasts sometime useful to do as well as making their shared artefact more usable for the periphery.

Note 1: in many wiki engines such as mediawiki and OpenGuide the tags are called categories, but they are really tags.

Note 2: How can I tag this post so that it appears in the wiki discussion as well?

Furl + del.icio.us

I compared Furl with del.icio.us just over a year ago on my old blog and chose Furl for the perceived advantages at that time. Since then, del.icio.us has developed and become more popular while Furl, though still more useful for some things, has stagnated. As I became more adept at bookmarklets, and now have access to a single action "Furl+delicious it" via blummy, I'll continue with both for the time being; delicious for quick social bookmarking and Furl for saving pages, publishing references and keeping safe copies of private notices. I do have my doubts as to how much use I will eventually make of all my saved links, in fact I have my suspicions that both of these highly acclaimed services could be alternatively regarded as very effective procrastination tools. "Thanks for the link, I've Furled it to look at later"

Group aggregation of del.ciou.us feeds

"Superglu: could that combine multiple bookmark feeds?"

Yes it could, as could the more open alternative MyGlu perhaps.

I think you are on the right track with this idea, it seems to me much more elegant and expandable than the group account idea, or the deliberately contrived tag names.

You might not want to aggregate absolutely everything tagged by all the members of a group though, since most people I imagine are researching several projects at once. But aggregating a series of closely related tags, and alternative spellings etc might provide a useful and focussed resource for a domain which the community of subscribers experience together and cross-fertilise with their own additions. As with much of web2.0 though, the social experience is more at an arms length than the meeting of minds which we are more used to in direct dialogue.

Clarification

Would I be right in thinking that these stats represent the popularity of the sites within the entire del.icio.us userbase regardless of how they have been tagged but looking at those tagged cop+maven, rather than the number of times they have been tagged by the community here.

It's the "all" view of the tag

( Flysketch diagram tutorial)

Attachment: del.png

Ah - thanks

Thanks Beth. It seems to me if I already subscribe using RSS then the inbox doesn't offer anything further, in fact it may be intended as a step towards RSS for people who haven't got there yet.

I'll be straddling Furl + del.icio.us for a long time yet anyway, unless I am defeated by the increasing supercomplexity of everything

del.icio.us and the in box

According to this article entitled "The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users"

http://slackermanager.com/2005/12/the_several_hab.html

the inbox is a powerful tool. I don't get it yet, would anyone encourage perseverence?

James Governor on Tag Gardeners

A speculative blog post on the emergence of professional tag gardeners.

http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/archives/001186.html

Against Tagging

Stephen Downes explains why he's against tagging in Community Blogging

Stephen Downes point

Maybe that wasn't the best article for me to point to, I have seen the argument against tagging put more succinctly. Searching I found this conference report:

"Downes says: the tag always under-describes the resource, and the word often mis-identifies the resource. There is also a big spike aspect to tagging: a small number of words are heavily used and thus become essentially meaningless. The popular tags are useless to Downes. If I donít know what the tag is, I wonít find it in the top ten list, I have to start searching randomly. Tagging also enforces a regimen for search."

I think Downes believes that tagging systems will inevitably lead to spam tagging and that content best describes itself through its own makeup rather than through the biases of the people who do the tagging.

I feel he might just have a point when dealing purely with text, but I can't see how the argument holds up against the tagging of photos, for example.