LIS 9763

Oh tagging and social bookmarking, how good an idea you truly are.  But how do we get everyone on board?

The Bokardo reading says a lot of what I feel about tagging, but especially when it is mentioned that users won't tag things if they don't feel that they have to or if there is no clear incentive.  Even then, people may not tag.  In some cases, as with my livejournal, I thought about tagging and how it would be useful for organization and finding memories - but in the end I never bothered.

I'm still trying to grasp the idea of taxonomy and folksonomy, so let me try out sort of defining them.  A taxonomy is a classification of a bunch of things. A folksonomy is the tagging of things by a network of people to categorize content.  I don't know if I really get it still.

But I do get tagging! So perhaps I will leave the folksonomy lesson until the folksonomy week.

I believe everyone is now familiar with what tagging and social bookmarking is, so what's more important is what we do with such a powerful opportunity.  The biggest use seems to be subject guides. These are created based on a link roll, (still from delicious) but it doesn't LOOK like it's created using a link roll from delicious. I think it would be interesting to have a feature like this because if you have really gungho users who tag and update a lot, your links and tags will update all the time as well. That sort of content is invaluable, because it's a reflection of your users, and (provided they are tagging) is up to date.

The use of social tagging, mentioned in the Hammond reading, is that it builds community.  I feel like a broken record on community building, but there it is again. Social software, like tagging and social bookmarking, just builds community! But I believe it was the Bokardo reading which said it's only one small drop in the bucket of social software, to be used in conjunction with wikis and blogs and all the other wonderful tools we have come to know and love :D

As I mentioned at the outset of this blog entry, people won't tag unless they get something from it or see the impact or bigger purpose.  I think that getting the library links and tags will be incredibly difficult, and I'm not convinced that tagging is a realistic future for libraries specifically.  It may work for casual tagging, for web site designers (and other tech saavy types), but to base library information on tagging I feel is hoping for too much.

Right now, Delicious is overrun by web designers and the excessively tech saavy, which does make perfect sense. It's also nicer than if this were overrun by the primary users of myspace (every 12 year old girl and her cat) but I guess it would be interesting to see what those 12 year olds tag too.  I've been tagging on delicious, but not enough.  Today I found out that McMaster University libraries has a Twitter account, so I tagged their website news entry that details why they dove in to the tagging phenomenom. I wish I could get one of those tag clouds for our course (in fact I probably could, but I haven't looked into it) where we could see the visual display of the tags, depending on how popular they are.