Archive for the ‘Tagging’ Category

Pinterest, the digital pinboarding website that exploded onto the scene just last year, has quickly become one of the top 10 most trafficked social networking websites on the Internet according to Hitwise. Cutting-edge libraries are already exploring ways the social app can be used to engage patrons and build community. Here are ten top-notch resources that will help you better leverage this new social tool.

1. 5 Ways to Use Pinterest in Your Library
2. 5 More Ways to Use Pinterest in Your Library
3. Pinterest and the New Meaning of Curation
4. Pinterest: A New Social Media Opportunity for Libraries
5. 20 Great Ways Libraries Are Using Pinterest
6. Pinterest for Libraries
7. 10 Pinterest Boards For eBook Fans
8. 26 Tips for Using Pinterest for Business
9. Is Pinterest the Next Game Changer: Infographic
10. 56 Ways to Market Your Business on Pinterest

Klint Finley at ReadWriteCloud suggests 3 Ways to Host Your Own Delicious Alternative. Libraries and other organizations will want to check out these three open source solutions that will let you host a custom social bookmarking service.

Margaret E.I. Kipp, and D. Grant Campbell report on a study that investigates Searching with Tags: Do Tags Help Users Find Things? Available via the E-LIS repository, this paper is currently in press and due to appear in Knowledge Organization, 2010, vol. 37, n. 4.

“This study examines the question of whether tags can be useful in the process of information retrieval. Participants searched a social bookmarking tool specialising in academic articles (CiteULike) and an online journal database (Pubmed). Participant actions were captured using screen capture software and they were asked to describe their search process. Users did make use of tags in their search process, as a guide to searching and as hyperlinks to potentially useful articles. However, users also made use of controlled vocabularies in the journal database to locate useful search terms and of links to related articles supplied by the database.”

via Resource Shelf

Marc Beja at The Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Wired Campus reports on a new social tagging initiative at Dartmouth College which challenges players to beat the clock as they add metadata to library images for free.

“Ms. Flanagan, a digital-humanities professor at Dartmouth College, is creating an Internet-based game in which users create descriptive tags for library images to improve searching through the library’s database. Although the program will be tested at the college’s library, Ms. Flanagan says the game will be open source and available for others to download and build upon.”

First Monday has published an article written by Alexis Wichowski titled Survival of the fittest tag: Folksonomies, findability, and the evolution of information organization in its May 4th issue.

“Folksonomies have emerged as a means to create order in a rapidly expanding information environment whose existing means to organize content have been strained. This paper examines folksonomies from an evolutionary perspective, viewing the changing conditions of the information environment as having given rise to organization adaptations in order to ensure information “survival”— remaining findable. This essay traces historical information organization mechanisms, the conditions that gave rise to folksonomies, and the scholarly response, review, and recommendations for the future of folksonomies.”

The March/April 2009 issue of D-Lib Magazine includes the article Profiling Social Networks: A Social Tagging Perspective written by five authors from across the globe. The article analyzes the social tagging behavior of members on Delicious, Flickr, and YouTube from 2005-2007 in order to gain a representative profile of each community. Their dataset includes 1 million bookmarks and 9.3 million tags from Delicious, 300,000 photographs and 1.4 million tags from Flickr, and 500,000 videos and 1.35 million tags from YouTube.

“After analyzing social tagging behavior in Delicious, Flickr and YouTube, it is apparent that tagging activities have increased tremendously from 2005 to 2007. An increasing number of individuals are using online social networks to tag resources for purposes of storage, access, and retrieval, both for themselves and for the purpose of sharing those resources with others. Through tag analysis, it is possible to develop a portrait of the social culture of a network and, in some cases, to identify trends of emerging or waning topical interests among users.”

Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer presents a Practical Guide To Content Tagging In Social Bookmarking in which he provides tips to stay organized and effectively categorize your favorites. Using Delicious as his primary example, Falls offers the following recommendations:

• Keep It Simple
• Keep It The Same
• Periodically Review
• Don’t Bookmark Everything

Be sure to check out the full article for his explanations as well as his 5 Delicious tricks.

via Social Media

Worldcat users can now classify items with tags according to the most recent issue of OCLC Abstracts. Users must be logged in to apply these categories or keywords as WorldCat’s tags are linked with individual accounts. OCLC has plans to roll out related functionality such as tag searches.

OCLC has been busy – this announcement comes right on the heels of the launch of their iPhone application.

via Matt Bolin

The folks at Educause have put together another of their 7 Things series documents, this time on the topic of geotagging which involves adding location information to an online object such as a photo. The latest brief answers the following questions about geolocation:

1. What is it?
2. Who’s doing it?
3. How does it work?
4. Why is it significant?
5. What are the downsides?
6. Where is it going?
7. What are the implications for teaching and learning?

The Delicious social bookmarking website has undergone a transformation to a sleek new design which is much easier on the eyes. No longer do you need to strain to see how many other people have bookmarked a resource highlighted in pink!! Here is a rundown of the changes from their blog:

“Speed: We’ve moved to a new infrastructure that makes every page faster. This new platform will enable us to keep up with traffic growth while ensuring Delicious is responsive and reliable. You may not have noticed, but the old back-end was getting creaky under the load of five million users.

Search: We’ve completely overhauled our search engine to make it faster and more powerful. Searches used to take ages to return results; now they’re very quick. The new search engine is also smarter, and more social: you can search within one of your tags, another user’s public bookmarks, or your social network. Now it’s easier to take advantage of the expertise and interests of your friends, not to mention the Delicious community at large.

Design: Finally, we’ve updated the user interface to improve usability and add a few often-requested features (such as selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks). Our goal has been to keep the new design similar in spirit to the old one, so all of you veterans should be able to jump in without any confusion. At the same time, we’re hoping that newcomers to Delicious will find it easier to learn. Check out the What’s New page for an overview of the changes, or watch this animation that sums it up nicely:”

The speaker presentation files for the recent Web 2.0 Expo which was held April 22-25, 2008 in San Francisco, CA are now available. If you weren’t able to attend the popular O’Reilly conference, you can still access the 50+ sessions including:

• Games 2.0: Why the Future of Games Looks More Like Zombies and Scrabulous and Less Like Halo 3
• How to Create Successful Unconferences, BarCamps, & Meetups for Almost No $$
• Social Data: Collecting, Mining, and Using it in Your Applications
• Taking Web 2.0 Offline and On the Desktop
• The Next Generation of Tagging: Searching and Discovering a Better User Experience

Less than two weeks ago we saw the Library of Congress partner with the photo-sharing website Flickr in a pilot project called The Commons to display some 3,100 historical photos, (Read our earlier coverage here). Within days of the project launch, the LOC received an overwhelming response. According to their blog, here’s a summary of what happened within the first two days:

• 392,000 views on the photostream
• 650,000 views of photos
• Adding in set and collection page views, there were about 1.1 million total views on our account
• All 3,100+ photos have been viewed
• 420 of the photos have comments
• 1,200 of the photos have been favorited

And just look at all of those tags!

As many of you may have heard, The Library of Congress has partnered with Flickr to display their historical photo collections in a social environment. They have uploaded two sets of photos with over 1,500 images each and have invited Flickr users to help describe them by assigning tags to photos. Users can also place comments on the images. The collections include “News in the 1910s” – a collection consisting of sporting events, crime, politics, and entertainment news photos, and “1930s-40s in Color” including photos of farming, factory life, railroads, and women working from 1939-1944. Check them out and add some tags!

New TagMaps from Yahoo! let you explore a world of Flickr geotagged images within an interactive map which you can display on your own website. The new mashup overlays user-created Flickr tags, on a Yahoo! world map. Tags can be clicked on to view photos taken in that geographic region. You can embed a TagMap onto your own website, or use the API they have available to create a customized TagMap of your own. This is a research prototype from Yahoo! Research Berkeley.

Via Micro Persuasion

Melissa L. Rethlefsen discusses tagging and social bookmarking in her Library Journal article Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us. Rethlefsen talks about tagging in del.icio.us, LibraryThing, and LibMarks, as well as tagging implementations in libraries, and specific features such as tag bundling, tag clouds, and rss feeds for tags.