Tagging and Social Bookmarking
What is tagging ? What is social bookmarking ?
They are two closely related things. Tagging is a way to mark or assign any piece of data with a keyword or other descriptive term. (v. Wikipedia).
Social bookmarking refers to various ways for users to share each others’ tags.
Watch this video on Social Bookmarking in the “Plain English” series for an excellent introduction to the concept.
For a more detailed explanation about how to share bookmarks with specific people, watch this short video by UPS Instructional Technology.
- How to share bookmarks — Delicious (Quicktime — 00:01:57)
- How to share bookmarks — Delicious (Windows media — 00:01:57)
What and how can I tag?
You can tag anything on the web. All you need is the address for a page (that it, its URL) and a place to store the tags about that URL so you get them easily. You use software to store the tags, and the most popular tool to do this is called delicious, more properly spelled del.icio.us.
- Main page http://www.delicious.com
- delicious information pages
- You should use the Firefox browser and the delicious plugin for it
What is Tagging Good For?
Tags are a way of overcoming two limitations in finding things: 1) literal searching engines like Google will only let you find words, not ideas or concepts; and 2) fixed categories (”taxonomies”) are made by experts and imposed on the data: you have to learn the categorization system first if you want to find anything. This is how libraries work, for instance.
Tagging, on the other hand, lets you create your own categories for things as you like and need, that are specific to your data and your ways of describing it. Tags are a way of searching for things that are more semantic and meaningful than just literal text searches.
What is metadata?
Metadata is the data about something rather than the thing itself. It’s data about the data. Tags are one form of metadata.
For example, a book is data; specifically, the information contained in it that you read. But the information about the book, publication date, author, ISBN number, are all metadata, they are data about the book. Another example is iTunes: the data is the music file that you can play, while such things as the name, album, genre, rating are all metadata.
Tags of web pages are ways of associating those pages with any idea or concept you find useful. Tags are the metadata and the pages are the data. But tags are metadata that you decide upon, rather than having to use some predefined categories made by others.
What is “folksonomy” ?
Folksonomy is a portmanteau of the word “folk” and “taxonomy”, and refers to any popular, non-professional method of classifying or categorizing objects. Professional categorizers dislike folksonomy because they are used to a model that must uniquely categorize physical objects rather than the data in them. Folksonomies sometimes don’t work too well with physical objects, since often their location matters, like finding a book in a library, or a CD in a store. But with digital objects, you can have both official taxonomies and multiple folksonomies at the same time and they don’t interfere with one another.
For more on tagging and folksonomy, including references to published studies on tagging, see here.
Applications with Built-In Tags
Also, you will have noticed that many applications now have tagging built into them, in order to overcome the limitations of literal text search and categories. The authors of the sites or applications have tagged their content with tags they believe will be useful to users when looking for things on the site. For instance, on Flickr you can tag your photos with terms you want.
Tags in applications you use usually come in two forms: a tag list, often found on blogs at the end of a page or post (like down at the bottom of this page, for example), and tag clouds.
What is a tag cloud ?
It’s a visual representation of the frequency of tags used to tag a collection of data. It is often used to help users search through things in addition to text search and hierarchical categories. You can click on any of the words to see all the information tagged with that term.
You will see one over on the upper left hand side of this screen, for instance, which is the list of the most common tags on this site. Typically, a tag cloud looks like that: more common tags are larger, and less common tags are smaller. Style matters in tag clouds, and certain standard good practices have emerged.
What is a text cloud ?
A text cloud is the visual representation of the frequency of words in a text. It is visually similar to a tag cloud, but represents data, not metadata.
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