all posts tagged “tagging”
As many of you know, the Common Craft site has gone through a major transition. It was migrated from Moveable Type to Drupal and received a nice new design. One of the outcomes of this has been a complete disruption of 3+ years of blog post categorization.
For years I used a tight set of 6 categories, like:
- Weblogs in Business
- RSS and Syndication
- Social Design
These aren't too bad, but still quite broad. Then I had a catch-all category called "Related Miscellany", to which 250+ post were attached.
The problem is that I'm using tags on the new site, and tag clouds for navigation. This means that all of the former categories turn into giant words in the tag cloud. You can imagine the appeal and inherent usefulness of a giant "Related Miscellany" tag in the cloud. It doesn't exactly highlight any ontological skill.
So, I must fix this situation and the only way to do so is to edit every post, remove old categories and add new, more relevant ones. I recently finished editing all 250+ posts in the "Related Miscellany" category and it's safe to say that I'd rather shave my neck with a cheese grader than have to repeat this process. Only 500+ to go!
Last week I participated in a Seattle Blogwalk (which I haven't yet written about- but soon!) one of the questions we asked was who had blogged about Hurricane Katrina. I raised my hand and talked about using my personal blog to let people know that our friend David Stitcher made it out of the city. I wondered at the time if there was any chance that someone who knows Dave, besides a regular reader, would be able to find that post.
Since, I've been following some of what Nancy White, Alexandra Samuel and many others are doing around building awareness, volunteerism and community participation in the aftermath of the devastation.
When it comes to testing the online tools we talk about so much, few things can compare to how they are used in these types of situations. Like people and agencies, they get tested.
I was interested to see that Alexandra has provided a guide for how people can use tags to increase the discoverability of vital information through tagging-- related to Katrina.
With the Katrina tagging guide, she is lowering the barriers to understanding how people can participate in the recovery online, in plain English. She even includes code that can be used for the Technorati tags.
In the face of this disaster, I hope that the blog world can collectively play some part in the recovery by increasing access to vital information. I applaud the community that has risen to the challenge.
We've seen them on Del.icio.us, Technorati, Flickr, 43 Things, Upcoming.org, Amazon and even personal blogs (scroll), but I'm hearing all sorts of different names. You know what I'm talking about- right? The groupings of words with the size of the text indicating the popularity or frequency of the word.
I heard a new one today from Zeldman, who calls it a "tag cloud", which he says is the new mullet. Funny. I like the "cloud" part, but it's not just tags (See Amazon or 43 Things above). My favorite, right now is a "weighted list", albeit vanilla. Amazon calls their's "concordance" and I've heard zeitgeist too.
So, what do you call this thing? What should it be called?
(This snippet is from Flickr)
You've likely heard of "The Gates", an art installation in Central Park by the Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
The other night, I thought about how I would be taking a bunch of photos if I were there. Then I thought- I bet there are some good ones, let's check Flickr". I searched for the tag "thegates" and found over 1200 photos of the art installation. It took maybe 10 seconds for me to find them. It was overwhelming, but really satisfying too.
Today there are over 2000 photos with that tag. I'm not sure it could get any easier, unless some sort of rating system showed me the best of the 2000 as deemed by viewers.
I've been enjoying the smart discussion about folksonomies and tagging at Many-2-Many. Danah and Clay have differing views on the subject:
First, don’t forget Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Classification schemes are always culturally dependent based on how people organize information. There is nothing universal about the terms that we use, the relationship between those terms and the meanings behind them. Many terms are contested, used differently by different populations for different reasons and otherwise inconsistent.
You want cultural dependence? The Library of Congress, in its top level categories for geographic regions, lists “The Balkan Penninsula�? as one main entity, and “Asia�? as another. Contested terms? Try finding queer literature in any library classification scheme. And so on. Folksonomic tagging improves on this by exposing cultural dependence and contestedness, rather than denying its existence, or hiding it by fiat.
Ooooh snap!
I get this feeling that the buzz around tags right now is warranted. I think we could be watching the liftoff of something big. If not, I bet we'll still get to see more tag fights.
Tags: many2many, tags, folksonomies, clayshirky, danahboyd
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