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 and blogs all use tags). Tagging, remember, allows you to associate keywords with online content - webpages, pictures, posts, etc.
It is considered a folksomony, aka an unstructured categorisation scheme, unlike the more formal taxonomies that require adherence to strict rulues and vocabularies eg. The Library of Congress.
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 favorites 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 - 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).
Discovery exercise:
1.Create an account at Delicious and take a look arou nd and add your own bookmarks and explore the site.
***Thing #13 - Explore Technorati and Learn How Tags Work with Blog Posts
Technorati is the leading search tool and authority on blogs, the number of blogs doubles just about every 6 months with over 51 million blogs currently being tracked by the site. So how does a person get their blog listed as part of the blogosphere and how can you tag your posts with keywords to make them more findable through a Technorati search? The answer to the first question is that your blog is probably already being captured by Technorati due to the fact that you're already using Blogger, the most popular blogging tool. But if you want to join the party and have your blog officially listed on Technorati and also take advantage of the watchlist and other features, you’ll need to claim your blog yourself.
As for tagging posts with Technorati tags?
This is easy, too. All you need to do is add a little bit of HTML code to the bottom of your post and Technorati will pick up these tags when it spiders (or web crawls) your site.
There are a lot of new features that have been added to Technorati, including new ways to search for blogs. You can search for keywords in blog posts, search for entire blog posts that have been tagged with a certain keyword, or search for blogs that have been registered and tagged as whole blogs about a certain subject (like photography or libraries).
Exercise:
Take a look at Technorati and try doing a keyword search for something of interest to you.
***Thing #14 - Blog Your Thoughts About These Technologies and How You Might Use Them
We've covered quite a bit of ground this week. Getting a handle on Delicious and Technorati can actually make your life easier, even though it may seem overwhelming right now. Experiment a little with what you've learned this week and post a blog entry about your thoughts and ideas on using these technologies.
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