Tagging, Tracking, Structured Blogging Charlene Li and Marnie Webb
What is tagging? a keyword or a label given to something (photo, link, podcast, blog post) to help organize material online. Assigned casually, not as a part of a formal taxonomy that you have to rigidly follow. Adhoc nature of tagging, sort of like your bookmarks – where did I put that link? which folder did I use? (a bookmark folder is like a tag for organization)
What’s the difference between a category and a tag? A category is a type of tag. "Tagging" allows a deeper level of categorization – he tags house, she tags home. (you can have a recipe category and then tag specific recipes based on what type of recipe you’re focusing on)
Jess (just say jess/chirky) – is it possible to put an invisible tag on your site (keywords in typepad can do)
Video doesn’t have text that can be searched, so if you add tags the video then becomes searchable.
Tag clouds? Navigation – most popular tags. ordered alphabetical and then size of words indicates most popular "tags".
Metadata – if tags categorize one piece of content, metadata is data about data. Keywords tags together form metadata. iTunes has metadata, type of podcast, duration, author, explicit content – structural info about an item.
Delicious = social bookmarking. Public bookmark folders, sorted by tags or keywords. Richer way to organize bookmarks. You end up with 200 tags and you forget how you tag – use mom once and then mother another time.
Are there any conventions about dealing with synonyms. Different words for the same thing is good – conveys information about the topic. (Saying coke, pop and soda makes it hard to find content but the fact that there ARE multiple words and phrases for something is important. ) Search engines are beginning to build in synonym toggles. "Related tags" often helps with this.
Keywords can be tags, tags can be keywords – it depends on how you’re using both.
Argument about keywords and tags. Context of tagging is IN and keywords is OUT – keywords is isolation, tagging is socialization.
(Can I just say this is fun? The whole keyword tagging frustration thing is fascinating. I think we need Badger in here with her post it notes to teach tagging, because these folks just don’t get it – and adding keywords in is causing more confusion and even mentioning categories is muddling things.)
Amy Gahran has a dream – to see a search engine that pulled together all of the tags on the internet. Technorati does to a small extent. Try Tag Fetch.
Here’s the link to the technorati tag bookmarklet
Charlene liks Furl – (I prefer spurl but I also toss my spurls into delicious). Furl saves a complete copy of the web page which is something spurl does not. Furl (and spurl) allow you to hide links private – apparently delicious has this too.
Marnie likes del.icio.us because it is serendipitous – she has fun exploring topics, watching the folksonomy, following hidden pathways. Not organized search, meandering activity particularly in new topic wanderings. Use a tag that a her "group" knows – they all ues the tag to share data. (like nancy white uses communityindicators)
"Structured blogging – microformats" – microformats is the standard used to map content. structures blogging is the front-end. How do you create microformats? Templates offered on sites. Mashups. Yahoo local, Judy’s book, Meetup Edegio use microformats.
hreview creator – paste the code onto your site. (Charlene doesn’t recommend) Plugins for wordpress and moveable type. Find them at structuredblogging.org
Technorati Tags: blogher, tagging, bloghercon, blogher06