So what exactly is tagging? Once upon a time, it meant someone spray painting a wall, often with gang-related graffiti. In Web 2.0-ease, however, it means something decidedly less violent or controversial, it means a way to organize information (watch this video--8:31--it is embedded below). Sometimes referred to as "folksonomies" (read this article), this type of user-based classification of date typically requires users to select a series of keywords to describe an online object, be it an image on Flickr, a blog entry to be listed on Technorati, or a book mark on del.icio.us. This user-based categorization offers an alternative way of slogging through the immense data cloud that is the World Wide Web. At least one author has used the term "hive mind" (read this article) to describe the phenomena.
Academics have become increasingly interested in the the topic in the last few years. One of the topics that has caught the attention of researchers is the idea of tagging as a tool for knowledge creation (read the PDF article-link is on the left--see note below). Not surprisingly, the Pew Internet and American Life Project (read the PDF of the study) has weighed in on the topic and even examined the ethnic composition of taggers.
Having read/watched the material for this week, explain in your own words what tagging/folksonomies is and what ideas struck you the most about the readings for this week. As usual, your comment should be 250+ words.
The article on knowledge creation is freely accessible when you are at TTU. I will send a copy by email as well.
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12 comments:
Tagging is simply labeling something online with keywords, so you and others can find it or describe it and make sense of it. A folksonomy is simply the bigger idea and scheme of those tags which emerge like trends. The neat things about them, is there inclusion of “the long tail,” or more two standard deviations away from the normal curve. So those who are on the fringes of a trend, or the up and coming can be included in a foklsonomy. They’re up-to-date and multi-dimensional. The down side is that people control them and people are not always on the same page at the same time, so an abundance of terms that mean the same thing can be found.
It seems intuitive that we would “tag things on the internet. It’s a large part of the way our brain works, that is, categorizing. So I’m surprised that tagging did not become a bigger thing sooner. I suppose that if you look at the historical progression of the Internet, it makes sense, but still, it seems so intuitive. Organize this by calling it that. Calling it that also allows other people to find it, because of its common label.
This is a helpful tool, but I can’t help but wonder if too much metadata will, in the end, bog down the system. It we over-tag something, will it have the same meaning. Can we take someone else’s interpretation of something and add our own and it still retain that meaning? Maybe it can. Maybe the semantics will not be big enough to argue about. But what about the pragmatics?
Side-note: It took me a minute to figure out why there would be a surge and sudden drop of usage on sites like delicious and Flickr in the Raine article. Then it occurred to me, Christmas.
To me tagging and folksonomies are keywords that individuals use to mark and organize information that is important or interesting to them. Individuals use these tags so that they can find their information in the future. And others can also find the information using the same tags. David Weinberger also described tagging as a way to examine the way people think and to investigate what they are most interested in. Tagging allows people to categorize the large amount of information that is online and make it more manageable.
Nikki mentions that she was surprised that tagging did not catch on sooner. However, I think tagging has been around for a while (maybe a different term), but the general public was not the ones creating the tags. In the recent past, a more select group of individuals, such as webmasters, were the ones tagging. With the creation and subsequent growth of social media, more and more people have been given the opportunity to create their own tags. With this ability, they have been able to show what’s most important to them and what they are focusing on at a particular time.
The most interesting element of these readings is that marketers are using these tags to determine what’s popular and it’s having an affect on what they market. I had heard of most of these sites, but I had not idea what businesses were using them for.
Another element I found interesting was Flickr. I had no idea one word could bring up so many different images.
As Nikki and Liz have both said, tagging is a way of giving some form of online data a keyword or label. This in turn helps the user to organize their data better on the site they are using and helps others to find it if they use the same keyword for the object. When a user gives multiple tags for the object, it helps others who use different vocabulary to find the data provided. As mentioned a couple of times in the articles and by Weinberger, the mass of tags for something, or folksonomies, bring together popular culture and "the long tail." Allowing users to see multiple layers in meaning to an object which before was only data that each user privately placed a description to.
It's interesting to see how marketers are starting to use these tags to find what is the popular trend in society. However as Nikki suggested it could just end up being another pile of words further down the line, with no real use or meaning. Some users take advantage of the tags to bring someone to their content under false pretense, or maybe simply follow what others have tagged their information as. Only time will tell if tagging will stay a large force in Web 2.0 or simply become a useless pile of words attached to online data.
Tagging and folksonomy is such an interesting topic that is vital to the online world as it continues to develop and grow. It makes me wonder whether the Internet gurus of the early ‘90’s could have imagined that the Web would have grown this large in such a relatively short amount of time and require such things as tagging to organize the cast space. After reading all the articles and watching the YouTube video I would say that tagging is just an organizing system for the Web in that different articles, pictures, blogs, etc. are filed away under code names so that they can be retrieved by the original user, or found by other Web users at some later date. The great thing about these “tags” is that no one has to learn the system or any code language to use it - the user files under what makes the most sense to him or her. This also can create some problems in that one picture or file can have several different names and locations, which can make it hard to find a specific file if the user has not filed it himself.
Tagging has also created a new way for researchers to study Web users. I would assume that most of the people actually using the “tagging feature” of Web activity are heavy users of the media because of the familiarity with the technology that is required to actually do this. Since the people are heavy users of the media, they will most likely be more passionate and have an opinion about certain traits and be good subjects to study. It’s interesting to look at what words are used to give meaning in the tagging and how the user links files together. Tagging has opened new opportunities for research and insight into the advancing technology.
What is tagging and folksonimies? Well wikipedia describes folksonimies as, “(also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging) is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content.” Basically folksonimies are you and your friends or whoever in the world wants to tag content on the web and make it faster to search for. Kind of like bookmarks for web pages but simpler. It is like tagging photos in facebook. Well that is the first thing that came to my mind. You tag people in the photos and when you click on photos of that person you see all of the tagged photos that they are in essentially. The only problem is that you only see the “tagged” items. So if something is not tagged then it will not show up in your search. Tagging is a simplified way of searching and finding things to me. I could tag a guitar I wanted as “Les Paul” but to me it’s about the guitar when in turn Les Paul is a man who a guitar is named after. So if you were searching for information about the man you might find the guitar. That is the only problem I see with it is that you might come across all kinds of things that are irrelevant to what you are searching for, but then again using search engines requires a knowledge all its own to find what you are really looking for. The thing that was most interesting to me was it can become a whole new way to search for books and articles online with tagging instead of using key search functions you could just type in the authors name or a word out of the title and you could find what you are looking for instead of doing things the old way, like the article about the American Life Project talked about, the Dewey decimal system. That is and will become a thing of the past because of innovations and social collaboration of tagging things and using folksonimies.
As prior post-ers have mentioned, tagging is user-generated keywords that are attached to some sort of web content (i.e. photos, articles, Web pages, etc.). Folksonomies are the stories told by the tags. That is, you can make assumptions about what different objects mean to those individuals who tagged them. This idea is one that I have a problem with. I am not an avid tagger, and do not attempt to create or "read" folksonomies. Thus, may question may be one of inexperience. How does one try and gather meaning from searching for tags in a typically anonymous environment? Sure, I can search for "cat" and get numerous items related to a cat. However, how do I try to understand the term cat when I can't fully relate the idea back to the user? That is, if "johndoe2008" tags a bunch of pictures with the word cat, what does that mean? I don't know who "johndoe2008" is. Is he a he, or a she? Does this person take a bunch of pictures of their cat because they love their cat or were just bored one day? If you cannot associate the term with a direct source, how can you determine the credibility of the information, much less the meaning?
Moving on...I was surprised to see that searching tags was a concern for people. What search engine returns a perfect keyword search? I have spent many frustrated hours researching a topic on Google or Ebsco. Not only do I use my keyword, but I have to know what keywords the authors or database used to describe the article. Likewise, not all phenomena are described by one word. Moreover, one has to know the vernacular of the topic they are searching. Last year, I took a class about emotion in the psychology department. Emotion can also be called affect. There are discrete emotions and there are moods, there are circumplex models, and evaluative space models...... In short, searching for anything requires the use of synonyms, slang, and knowledge of the topic. I don't see why searching tags for cats, and remembering to include felines and kittens, would be such a stretch or an inconvenience.
And, finally, I was surprised by the Pew Survey. I would not have thought that tagging would have been so evenly represented among demographic groups. Because it is an Internet-related activity, I thought it would have represented general Internet usage demographics more.
"Tagging" is organizing 'metadata' into manageable and easy to use forms that will enable users to find a piece of information easily using tools such as search engines. Therefore, finding specific data such as blogs, pictures, websites, etc. will be easier for net users in the Web 2.0 scenario.
It is interesting to see how in a span of 3 years, tagging has become such a popular feature of the world wide web. Like the articles and the interview showed, there are both pros and cons to the same. On one hand, it allows for easy sorting of data from a wide range of information. What is of note is that it is a collaborative effort, like the "hive mind" concept. This is an especially critical point of Web 2.0 where a lot of new content is user generated and maintained. It is of use in many applications. For example, I can find specific advertisements that I would need whether for educational or for work purposes. I can tag an ad an "Cannes ad", i.e an award-winning ad or classify it accoring to categories such as "sporting goods" or "consumer products". I can even say what agency created it such as "Wieden" or "CP+B". This possibility makes it all the more relevant and exciting.
I also liked how how in the interview the talk brought up the concept of the "longtail". It was also interesting to note how only 28% of net users claim to be active taggers. It it my assumption that this diffusion will wind its way down to the common user very soon, very likely becoming a part of daily internet use, and become just as common as checking email is today.
However, the drawbacks too merit some thought. There is a tendency to tag an item in a category to which it may not be the right fit. This may prove a bit frustrating. However, perhaps with more sophisticated tools which will sieve through a number of tags and then select the most appropriate ones, the accuracy of the tags will be almost true.
It was also quite interesting to see the breakup of the ethnic groups. What are the driving forces for a specific group to tag more frequently than others? Why are other groups lagging? It would be worthwhile to find out the socio-economic and technological factors that lie behind this phenomena. Will there be a trickle down effect? Like most humans, some of us are more organized and more technologically inclined than others. Will they continue to be dominant minority? Or will the layman take to tagging like these innovators have. That is a question that interests me.
Personally, I have never tagged any piece of information, but have used the help of tags to retrieve information I am seeking. However, I do not see myself as someone who is going to be tagging on a regular basis unless I need information instantly and easily, such as looking for an advertisement specifically for work related purposes. It will make hunting through numerous sites a less tedious task. Tag clouds will give me a general direction, and specific "tag filters" which I foresee as the next extension, will lead me to the ad in question. No doubt, it is a very novel tool and makes business more efficient and data collection faster and more efficient than it was just a few years ago.
I think Nikki had a good definition of tags; they are simply keywords that allow people to describe something online. From what I gathered from the readings and the video, folksonomies are user tag systems that allow users to create their own tags. It is a way for users to “remember” their content. People no longer have to use related terms or the most popular tags; there is no right or wrong tags. They work as “the voice of the people.” By tagging something a certain way that person essentially is telling us what they think of that content. Folksonomies express the momentum behind these tags.
The part of the readings/video that really caught my attention was when the video conversation shifted to marketers and advertisers. As one of the men said on camera, one can find out a lot about a person by the way they tag. This could allow people to reach out and connect with them, which in turn could create social groups. There is also the potential for marketers to see how people think. The question is how accurate are these tags? They may not be a completely accurate portrayal of the community. The man in the video made a good point when he said that the tag he uses may not be the one he relates to the most, but the one he thinks will relate to the most people. Although they may not be entirely accurate, I do agree that they could show certain trends and provide good qualitative information. Advertisers and marketers might have found yet another way in.
Taggomg/folksonomies is a user-based categorizing method of files, photos, or blogs on World Wide Web. It seems to me, for example, I tagged one photo means I give a name to that photo to remember so that it might me easy to organize and find. Tagging/folksonomies is making different post-its on web-based files. It reminds me how I file my thesis data. I had lots of different data for my thesis. I had to organize those files with different colors of post-its because it makes me to find those data easily. Also sometimes unexpectedly, different colors of post-its help me to categorize another theme.
From the reading, tagging/folksonomies is active way of using web and also encourage users to use web easily. One thing was that tagging/folksonomies started at the individual level to organizing files but at some point it became to the group. Therefore, it is another virtual way to communicate and form community on Internet. People will use tag to find what they want and also they will use to represent them-file, photo, or blog content-through tag. The whole process is users are encoding the value by their own lens not as systematically. It is quite fascinating idea that I create my version of meaning to file that I have on my web. It makes me feel more special and unique when using web. Usually, it is really hard for having those feeling on Internet.
Tagging/folksonomies also connect several different meanings on web in one way. So through tag, people can get any kinds of data in one category. It categorizes some way and merges in different way. I can search “Yellowstone” tag in photos, blog contents, or any other forms of data. Tagging/folsonomies seems to me the way for making individual version of search engine not based on hard system but on personal web.
Like many have already stated, tagging is simply people giving various items on the Internet keywords that will help them and others search and find things. People often add tags to items such as photos, news articles, blogs and even entire web pages. For the most part, tagging an item or page can make searching the Internet much easier. For example say you get on a site like Flickr.com and search for “flower,” then within seconds thousands of images uploaded by millions of users who have tagged their images with “flower” will appear.
While tagging generally makes searching easier, it can also make things a lot more work. Take the “flower” example, someone could have tagged the image “flower” possibly because a person who appears in the image is named Flower (I know, this is an extreme example, but hopefully it makes the point), or perhaps a flower only appears in a small part of the image. This can apply to other things as well, for instance with YouTube, one may tag their video with a spoken line from the video; a video some of my friends and I made while at work was tagged “it’s for class.” This was something that was said once in the very beginning of the video and the video had nothing to do with a class.
My point is someone may add a tag that has very little to do with the item being tagged. Thus, making the found item irrelevant for the person searching for information.
Scott mentioned a case that would fit this scenario well regarding Les Paul guitars. The tag may only be “Les Paul,” although the item being tagged is actually a Les Paul guitar.
As far as folksonomies go, I am still a little unclear. Basically what I got from the video and articles was that folksonomies are when a group of people come and tag an item. The tag can all be different, but still are similar and about the same item. According to the video, Weinberger stated “(they) express the momentum behind the tag/term.” Also, according to Terdiman’s article a folksonomy is “where a lot of people are describing one object.” This makes the idea of a lot of people tagging one item clearer to me.
One thing that really stood out to me and I have encountered was when Weinberger mentioned in the video that you can learn a lot about someone based on how they tag something. Basically, we find out how other people see things. When I had to do a baby photo shoot, I searched Flickr for some ideas (I had never photographed a baby before). Obviously, I came up with thousands of images tagged “baby,” “babies first moments,” etc. But some of the other tags really interested me, tags like “(new) life,” and “creation.” Seeing tags like these really makes you think more about the person who uploaded the photo and helps you to see things how they do while most people see a baby, they see a creation.
Also, while I was curious about the decline in use of sites like Fickr and Delicious around the month of December. Nikki mentioned Christmas, however I do not see how Christmas would cause web sites to decline in use; granted this is when a lot of people are shopping, but with the increase in Internet sales especially during the holidays. I do not think Christmas would be a reason the use in these sites would decline.
I think the idea of tagging/folksonomies is a great way to keep the massive amount of user content on the internet organized and accessible. I think tagging is the idea of labeling pictures, blog posts, and other content the same way we name files on our personal computers. A way for the user to come back to that specific item, while the internet allows any user to search for that word or tag and find what other people have identified/ tagged.
After reading about the adoption of this idea and the flurry of attention it has received I went to the 43things.com and started looking around. I found that it does help identify certain areas, but as Wendy discussed many searches require more depth than one word. It creates a massive return of tagged items when the tag has different meanings for every user. Tagging is a good start to organizing the information available, but I think there is a learning curve to deciphering how to acquire the specific data a person is searching for. By that I mean learning how to identify an area and then narrow the search through more tags or key words and eventually get to a manageable return of documents that are pertinent to a user’s search.
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can’t imagine what a mess the Web would be if there was not a system in place to identify information through these tags! It would be more bogged down than it can be now. I think it is great that users do not have to learn a new language or code to tag items, that we can all use terms we know and apply them to our data on the Web. Tags have given a freedom to users that is somewhat universal, the difference of opinion on what a tag means among users also allows us to see other information that I might not have identified as related to my search or topic. I think the use of tags allow for a broadening of a person’s ideas and scope.
Ashley McGee
Tagging and folksonomies are a way to organize information so that you can remember it and access it easily for future reference. Just like Web 2.0 it engages the user more and allows users to participate and add their own input without having expert knowledge. The interesting thing about tagging is the ability of other users to find their own interests through the simplicity of other users' tags/labels. With the internet today being so massive and containing so much information about anything and everything, tagging allows users to find what they want without having to look through everything else that is not relevant to what they want. Tagging is a tool that benefits all. Marketers use this as a tool to gain knowledge on "what's cool" and allow them to access the most up-to-date information and use it for the benefit of both the business and the individual. Marketers value this information it seems like and now the tables have turned, it is now the users that dictate the latest fad or whatnot to the marketers not the marketers dictating to users what is supposedly, the latest fad.
Weinberger made and interesting point about tagging and how it integrates popular culture and the long tail. The ability for users to find an object with a specific description and the access to view layers of information about that object is an amazing capability and need not be taken for granted. Categorizing information on the internet is something that has grown over the past few years. Just like the internet and its advances, tagging has become another development that users have slowly but surely use more and more everyday without knowing or thinking about it. Just like Web 2.0, I use tagging and didn't really know I have been using it until reading all of these articles. I did not even really think about how useful this tool really is. After reading the blog and articles, I have learned to appreciate this tool even more. It is like a new language for the internet and an easier way to search and find what you want.
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