Tagging is an open and informal way of allowing users to describe online content (webpages, pictures & posts) by associating keywords.
Please watch this short YouTube video to explain Social bookmarking in plain English
The Horizon report (2007) has this to say:"A little group of Web 2.0 technologies—tagging and folksonomic tools, social bookmarking sites, and sites that make it easy to contribute ideas and content—is placing the power of media creation and distribution firmly into the hands of the people formerly known as the audience” (Rosen, 2006).
No longer satisfied to be consumers of content, today’s audience create content as well. Producing, commenting, and classifying are just as important as the more passive tasks of searching, reading, watching, and listening."
We’ll be looking more closely at Web 2.0 applications that take serious advantage of tagging (we've already looked at few - Flickr, YouTube, librarything and blogs all use tags). Tagging, remember, allows you to associate keywords with online content - webpages, pictures, posts, etc.
It is considered a folksonomy, aka an unstructured categorisation scheme, unlike the more formal taxonomies that require adherence to strict rulues and vocabularies eg. The Library of Congress.
As a library employee you know a thing or two about these – At the University of Limerick we use the largest categorisation scheme on the planet, Library of Congress subject headings.
Also known as the red books, the LCSH is the most comprehensive list of subject headings in the world and as such is the only one accepted as the worldwide standard.
This week we’ll look at still more innovative applications that take great advantage of tagging – Delicious and Technorati
Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site that lets you save bookmarks to a central location (so that you can access your web favourites regardless of the browser or computer you're using) and then describe them all with tags so that you can easily find them again.
How is that social? Well, in addition to tagging your bookmarks, you can see how other users have tagged the same links and see related websites are important to them. This is an excellent way to find websites that may be of interest to you. Delicious even offers RSS feeds {link to blog} - you can create a shared bookmark site (say, for your team) and receive news every time a new link is added (say, when one of your colleagues add a new link). It is also being used to assist with collaborative online reference.
Discovery exercise:
1.Take a look around delicious using the account we have created for this project
Note: In this account you will find lots of resources that have been highlighted or used throughout the course of the Learning 2.0 program. Explore the site options and try clicking on a bookmark that has also been bookmarked by alot of users. Can you see the comments they added about this bookmark or the tags that they used to categorise this reference?
2.How are libraries using Delicious? would your library find it beneficial? Would you find it beneficial? and as usual write a blog post about this.
Optional
3.If you are up to the challenge create your own Delicous account, add your own bookmarks and explore the site.
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The information provided on this by the LNSS staff was very impressive, as was the talk by Sinéad. However, despite its lovely name, I was a bit resistant to Delicious. It's a bit of a culture change, organising my information in this way. But I can tell that I'll get there and that I'll be glad to have made the journey. Definitely I can see that the library could use Delicious and social tagging to share resources.
ReplyDeleteAt the simplest level, I very much like the sharing between my workpoints aspect, so that my favourites are the same wherever I work. I was impressed on searching Delicious for LNSS to discover sites tagged by project participants. I'll have to go back to these another time.