LIS 9763

1. Has your view of social software changed since starting this course? If so, how?

If you find that I am type folkesonomies a lot, I apologize in advance -- it's tough when you're programmed from birth to add an extra letter into a word because it's your last name! I'll try to keep a grasp on it.

After the unit last week and our group project, I have a better understanding of what folksonomies are and how they are used. This week's case studies showed that tagging in library catalogues is the next big thing. I already sort of knew this because the University of Western Ontario and the University of Guelph both have new library catalogues in beta that have tagging features.

Folksonomies give people the ability to classify information in a way that is clear to them. If a user can locate information and store it in a manner that is easy for them, then learning is that much more fun! Tags that people select to label content are terms that they can easily remember.

Folksonomy, like many topics in today's culture, is experiencing a rather dialectical debate (heavily for vs.

I wish there was a common craft video for folksonomies, I love those.

I wanted to say first and foremost, after reading some of the articles this week, I GET IT.  For the first time, I do get what a folksonomy is.  It's classification built from the ground-up, by many individuals just tagging things like we do here in lis9763.  I never really gave thought to the tag clouds, but they're really interesting and representative of what lots of people are doing and what people are thinking at any given time.

So sorry for the late blog post!  It's just been one of those weeks where things just don't seem to be going my way.  Anyhow, here are my thoughts on this week's topic.

Generally speaking, I am one to agree with Porter, who notes that social bookmarking and tagging is most useful as a means of organizing one’s own digital content on their terms; as he says, “personal value precedes network value.” However, I do not view bookmarking and tagging as some sort of keyword-revolution that trumps the powers of more “top-down,” static means of structuring the organization of information.

Alright, here's the deal.  As those of you who were in the chatroom late on Wednesday night have already put up with me grumping about how delicious is no longer my friend.  As I said starting out, I'm on Co-Op at the moment with the federal government, and my project is developing several subject guides using delicious.  I have been neck-deep in tagging (on and off) for the last two months.  It's not all I've been doing by any means, but it's been taking up my time in significant chunks.