Test Drive #6: Folksonomies & Tagging

Watch Common Craft's Social bookmarking in plain English video to introduce this week’s topic.



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 creates 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 several - Flickr and blogs use tags). Tagging, remember, allows you to associate keywords with online content - webpages, pictures, posts, etc. It is considered a folksonomy, aka an unstructured categorization scheme.

Categorization scheme
As a library employee you know a thing or two about these – the largest categorization scheme on the planet, Library of Congress subject headings, though, is much more formalized and is considered a taxonomy.

This week we’ll look at more innovative applications that take great advantage of tagging – Del.icio.us, Technorati, and Library Thing.

Del.icio.us
Del.icio.us In addition to having an excellent name (yes, that’s a real URL – the .us at the end stands for United States), Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site that lets you save bookmarks to a central location (no more copying them to multiple browsers on multiple computers) and classify them all with tags. It is an easy way to create bookmarks that can be accessed from anywhere.

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.

Del.icio.us 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 adds a new link). It is also being used to assist with collaborative online reference.

Discover: Take a look around Del.icio.us using the account that was created for this exercise. Look at the list and see how it looks as a cloud. How are libraries using Del.icio.us?

1. The National Library of Australia's AskNow chat reference service uses a Delicious tag cloud to display links to useful resources
2. Sutherland Shire Libraries tag cloud
3. Cleveland Public Library’s tags

Explore:
Using these notes prepared by Sharon Morris at the Colorado State Library set up your own delicious account and put a link to it in your blog. [hint: it will still work even if you can’t download the toolbar icons].

Create a blog post about your experience and thoughts about using this tool in libraries.
Can you see the potential of this tool for research assistance?
Or just as an easy way to create bookmarks that can be accessed from anywhere?

Technorati
So now that you’ve been blogging for awhile, you might be wondering just how big the blogosphere is.

Well according to Technorati, the leading search tool and authority for blogs, there are over 112 million blogs currently being tracked by the site. Yes, big numbers. But, as you’ve already seen for yourselves, blogging is so easy that almost every industry (including libraries) have been trying to find ways to make blogging work for them.

That's why, this week, we're going to look more closely at Technorati.

Do you want to make sure your blog is being tracked? Register your blog with Technorati. Do you want to tag your posts to make them easier to find through a Technorati search? Perhaps not your Licence 2 Test Drive blog, but if you owned a business and were trying to attract attention you'd register it with Technorati.

As a blogger (aka someone who uses blogger.com to blog) you are probably getting tracked by Technorati already - it keeps track of new Blogger blogs by default. But if you want to take full advantage of the service Technorati offers up, you'll need to do this more formally and claim your blog.

And the tagging in Technorati - it's easy - you either paste a bit of HTML code into the bottom of a blog post or follow the simple directions you find when you get to the Technorati website. Once one of these are in place, Technorati will pick your tags up when it spiders (or web crawls) your blog.

So what's really popular in the blogosphere these days?

Take a look at Techorati's popular page.

And now that you've seen what is incredibly popular in the wide world, we'll take a look at what is popular in the smaller library world.

Discover #2
1. Head over to Technorati
2. Try a keyword search for “bookmobile”
3. What can you find if you use the Advanced Search feature – try “bookmobile”. Are the results different?

LibraryThing
LibraryThing was developed by booklovers, for booklovers and its basic function is to quickly and painlessly create an online catalog of your personal book collection. What makes it even more special is its social networking component - once you've entered your books, you get to see everyone elses via book titles, authors, and the tags you assign to each entry. Look at the Library Thing tour. Take a quick run through these seven or eight screens for an overview of key Library Thing features and functions.

Take a look at some libraries who are using LibraryThing:

1. NoosaBookClubs LibraryThing
2. Kingston City Council Library in Melbourne has LibraryThing built into their online catalogue. When you use thier online catalogue and click on the title of a book, you will be able to:

• Find new books to read by similar authors or on similar topics
• Use the tags you and others have added in LibraryThing to find books you're interested in
• Coming soon you will also be able to rate and review books in thier catalogue

You can also add a widget to display titles that are in your catalogue or install a Library Thing Search box on your blog or any other website you've set up (instructions are here).
So why join the ranks and create your own library online? With more than 21 million books to date it’s already half the size of Libraries Australia (BTW: LibraryThing also has a group forum for library staff).

Adventure:
1. Take a look around LibraryThing and create an account
2. Add a least 5 books to your library
3. Blog about your findings and be sure to link to your LibraryThing catalogue
4. Already have a LibraryThing account and want to try something new? Give Shelfari or GuruLib a try instead