Look! Mtagger!!

The Library of Congress announces a partnership with flickr to collect metadata.

A much better than average report on the relationships between librarianship and the values of libraries and the values held by the media savvy, technology-centered students of today. Describes the two sets of values, and describes how libraries can adabt to the new expectation in meaningful ways.
 

pg 99 "It is clear that Millennials and others comfortable with a wide range of media and technologies will redefine the traditional manifestations of research and creative activity with these new mashed, cut and pasted creations. For them, the line between consumer and creator is blurred in a way that previously was not possible."

pg 100 "Clear rifts have emerged in the virtual terrain that is occupied by library policies, services and collections and is explored by online users. These rifts or disconnects can be grouped into three classifications for redress. These include technology (infrastructure and integration), policy (copyright, IT policy, liability), and unexploited opportunities."

Argues for the usefulness of collaborative tagging, and highlights the known problems with free tagging. Points to some obvious, and some more controversial ways of limiting problems of inter-tagger inconsistency and meaningless distinctions.

 

In this article we look at what makes folksonomies work. We agree with the premise that tags are no replacement for formal systems, but we see this as being the core quality that makes folksonomy tagging so useful. We begin by looking at the issue of "sloppy tags", a problem to which critics of folksonomies are keen to allude, and ask if there are ways the folksonomy community could offset such problems and create systems that are conducive to searching, sorting and classifying. We then go on to question this "tidying up" approach and its underlying assumptions, highlighting issues surrounding removal of low-quality, redundant or nonsense metadata, and the potential risks of tidying too neatly and thereby losing the very openness that has made folksonomies so popular.

Shows the practices of taggers and tags.

 

Collaborative tagging describes the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content. Recently, collaborative tagging has grown in popularity on the web, on sites that allow users to tag bookmarks, photographs and other content. In this paper we analyze the structure of collaborative tagging systems as well as their dynamical aspects. Specifically, we discovered regularities in user activity, tag frequencies, kinds of tags used, bursts of popularity in bookmarking and a remarkable stability in the relative proportions of tags within a given url. We also present a dynamical model of collaborative tagging that predicts these stable patterns and relates them to imitation and shared knowledge.

Looks at the development of various classification systems leading up to tagging, or user created metadata. Argues that tagging more closely mirrors the nature of web information.

Argues that ontologies are a bad ideal for organizing the world online. Points out that library classification systems are designed to optimize space on the shelves, not to describe the essences of identities. Also, that library classification systems are fundamentally about organizing books, not about organizing the enormity of human knowledge. The same flaws exists in a hierarchical file system. That it is designed with the assumption that a thing can only be in one place at one time -- it makes some attempt to have the organizional structure of ideas match the physical world, where in fact a pointer, or an idea, or a metaphorical path can be in countless places at the same time, and can have many equally important and useful relationships which describe it.

That ontologies are useful where there are expert users, clear categories and a limited domain. But, much less useful for non-expert users or large domains, and fuzzy categories. Links are the universal pointers on the web, and the addition of tags is simple, and provides a much more useful finding system than an ontology. With a system like delicious, you get to know who's doing the tagging, not just what the tags are, so you get to limit searches by people and time, limiting the size of your group [penntags tie-in].

Very clear pros and cons of folksonomies versus more traditional classification systems. Looks at when and for what each kind of classification is most useful.

A Columbia Librarian posted a long article about tagging systems and their use in libraries. Interesting reading.

A beautiful brief essay about tags.

This paper analyzes the tagging patterns exhibited by users of del.icio.us, to assess how collaborative tagging supports and enhances traditional ways of classifying and indexing documents. Using frequency data and co-word analysis matrices analyzed by multi-dimensional scaling, the authors discovered that tagging practices to some extent work in ways that are continuous with conventional indexing. Small numbers of tags tend to emerge by unspoken consensus, and inconsistencies follow several predictable patterns that can easily be anticipated. However, the tags also indicated intriguing practices relating to time and task which suggest the presence of an extra dimension in classification and organization, a dimension which conventional systems are unable to facilitate.

This paper examines the context of online indexing from the viewpoint of three different groups: users, authors, and intermediaries. User, author and intermediary keywords were collected from journal articles tagged on citeulike and analysed. Descriptive statistics and thesaural term comparison shows that there are important differences in the context of keywords from the three groups.

"Philosophical relativism appears to be the underlying philosophy behind folksonomies. Because of those underpinnings, it is possible to jettison the limitations of a traditional classification statement such as "A is not B". In a folksonomy system, "A is relative to B", because each item's index terms will depend on the individual user and the tags he or she decides to use. A philosophy of relativism allows folksonomy to draw on many users with various perceptions to classify a document instead of relying on one individual cataloger to set the index terms for that item. Thus, classification terms become relative to each user."

Really well, reviewed in TechCrunch, this is a new, open source social bookmarking tool. Apparently, it allows you to upload and bookmark all kinds of files.

 

Google Notebook makes web research of all kinds – from planning a vacation to researching a school paper to buying a car – easier and more efficient by enabling you to clip and gather information even while you're browsing the web.

And since Google Notebook lives in your browser, you won't be left with a scattered collection of notes, Word docs, and browser bookmarks to sort through; all your web findings will be gathering into one organized, easy accessible location that you can access from any computer.

A very very long annotated list of social bookmarking sites.

My favorite article. I wish I could force you to read this article. please...

"And you would never ever get this organization of knowledge right. Its not a solvable problem. It cant be done. Theres not a right way of doing it because there’s no single way of organizing this stuff. Taxonomies are not reflections of nature, they’re tools. And tools depend on what you want to do. It depends on your context. So along comes tagging."

A blog post looking at the ways people use delicious and highlighting that just as much of the stuff on delicious is junk as the reset of web.

Allows users to store, tag, and share locations -- based on google maps, but does interesting things. Users add photos of places, and lots of other tagged info about the places.

Another "catalog your own collection" site, but with a multimedia approach.

Listible is a new way to get relevant resources quickly.

By using Web 2.0 features such as AJAX, folksonomy (tagging), social elements such as voting/commenting and the listible's listonomy (listing), resources can be sorted in a way that will be digestible.

Techcrunch post about google bookmarks in IE Toolbar.

 "Google Bookmarks have no “social” or sharing feature. And while it is disappointing that bookmarks are not available yet for Firefox, I will say that the interface in IE is excellent. In addition to setting tags, users can access bookmarks directly from the toolbar via a drop down menu containing chosen tags."

TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feeds you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. Clicking on the tag's link will display a list of all the article abstracts associated with that keyword.

A nice 2 page pamphlet describing social bookmarking. Clear and concise.

A very clear description of the proposed SmartFox application.

A list of lots of sites that show various ways of visualizing delicious tags, from tagclouds to all sorts of other systems.

Check this out. Feedburner has added this really cool feature to their feeds, which allows you to email, or tag to delicious, an item directly from your feedreader. From techcrunch.

I have no idea what to do with this but it is at least a way to get around the fulltext issue in CSA if absolutely necessary.

Here The Search Guy claims that inconsistency in assigning keywords is the problem with tagging, and I would say that that same inconsistency is the whole reason why tags are useful in some instances. Because if I'm looking for something that I've already found, I want to be able to search for it in the context that I remember it, and not in some arbitrary other context that someone else imagined. It's not a replacement for subject headings in most cases, but is another way of keeping information.

This is a new browser, based on the Firefox model, that incorporates tagging and feeds into its structure. I wonder how hard it will be to add extensions.

"On a tactical level, this means that web sites that focus on improving their content, updating more frequently, recruiting users through community, etc. are missing half the picture--the half that says that if you issue APIs for your site's products and services, allow remixes, encourage--no, help--users tag your data--and RSS-ify everything--you'll be far ahead of the game and grow links--and audience--like crazy because your discoverability will soar. In other words, you need to not only improve your destination, you need to move off it."

We're getting good press from one of my favorite blogs. yay

This is linked from inside Pluck, which I was using to see how it's working these days. 

Shadows is a social bookmarking service for discovering, sharing and managing information on the web. Shadows supercharges this information with a "Shadow Page" — a community blog for any web page that includes views, ratings, tags, and comments by you, your friends and the Shadows community.

This is the topic of my bibliography. I will write a whole  about this film.

These are instructions about using PennTags. For more help, contact Laurie Allen at laallen@pobox.upenn.edu. Or AIM upennliblaurie

A blogpost from LibraryCrunch listing great additions to the library catalog of the future.

Another one of those articles that describes the whens and why's of traditionaly classification schemes versus folksonomies and tagging systems.

This is amazing. Shared document editing that can be uploaded or downloaded and shared in a million ways, including sending right to a blog. Writeboard is totally primitive compared to this, which allows you to tag your documents.

This is a really hard thing to tag. Basically, it's a grid that shows what little applications exist that combine other commong applications. So, for instance, what exists to combine Flickr with Delicious. or with Google Earth. Or amazon.

Mike already tagged this one, but it's quite fascinating so I thought I'd tag it again. So, if this does what I think it does, we could export bookmarks from delicious --> tagit and vice versa. Which would be so cool.

NCSU is starting a "my library" project that appears to include a tagging resource called MyLinks. But, it looks like you have to log in.

A more popular introduction to tagging from Salon. If you're not a member of Salon.com, prepare to watch a loong ad. Wouldn't it be cool if the library could get a library subscription to Salon?

From April 2005 issue of D-Lib Magazine, this artilce gives an overview of social bookmarking tools.

Citeulike has some really great qualities -- like the fact that you can see what people are reading. But, it's sort of annoying to get citations into CiteUlike sometimes. The cloud of tags on the right of the main page shows you how popular given tags are. The bigger the tag, the more items it contains.

A relatively short article on tagging systems, and their popularity.

"This is Connotea, a free online reference management service for scientists created by Nature Publishing Group...Connotea helps you store your reference list online, which means that it's readily accessible, it's linked directly into the literature and it's easily shared with your colleagues. Opening your references to other researchers enables you to discover new leads by connecting to the collections of those with similar interests to you.

Web application LibraryThing lets you catalog all the books you own and use tags to organize your collection.
Add book titles by entering a title and viewing search results from the Library of Congress or Amazon. LibraryThing adds the book’s card to your catalog with ISBN, publisher, year and an image of the book cover. You have space to add a book summary, tags, your comments and a review. See what other users also have each book in their library and what they’ve tagged it. LibraryThing is an impressive cataloging app that feels like del.icio.us for books.

Flickr allows users to store and organize their own images, and to view, tag, and comment on other immages.

It takes a little getting used to, but Delicious is an incredible tool for keeping track of websites and finding other ones. I never really bookmarked things before delicious, but after a little practice, I can't imagine life without it. I have feeds for my favorite tags (like one for GIS) so I can see what's happening in the web world. Because of the interests of the people using it, it still tends to be pretty techy in the links in there, but more and more people are using it all the time, with their own interests. It's worth trying to get to know it, I think.