CogBlogged Tagged ‘folksonomy’

cc licensed flickr photo by Zervas One can hardly read a twitter stream these days without tripping over a boat load of hash tags (for those knot sure of what twitter is or what hash tags are, please go check out Oprah or some other oracle, I am not feeling like explaining everything…). First of all, I completely get, grok, and am on board with the desire, the reason for hash tags. Twitter as is, lacks anything in its architecture to allow cross grouping oh content. And hash tags do fill that purpose, though IMHO rather awkwardly. But before going there, I again wonder about our cranial capacity to keep track of hash tags. Event ones are of course short lived. I have been gaming them, toying with them for a while but creating what I call #totalUselessAndRidiculous tags. Just for the fun of it. Just to through a spanner [...]

Are tag clouds, as Read/Write Web suggests, entombed? dead? On my fleet of NMC WordPress site I am shifting to using tags more on posts as an organizer, and tossing some clouds on the pages (see lower right sidebar of Pachyderm Services). Its a bit easier on these sites that have a relatively low number of posts to go and “back tag” content. But here at the old Yeller CogDogBlog, there are a lot of old bones- this, when published will be number 2100. And my tagging in the past, has been, well spotty. On the other hand, I was never too rigorous with the categorizing, so I am thinking as far as being effective, the approaches may be tied for last place over here. Never the less, I am more of a loose ranging tagger than a cubby-hole categorizer, so I have started tagging posts, and swapped out the [...]

I’m still drowning in a flotsam of un-done tasks, but I was glad I shoved by a little bit of time to check our Leigh Blackall and Sean FitzGerald’s presentation for Cool Results: Engaging Clients in E-learning hosted by LearningTimes Australia. It’s well worth a look, or at least tossing a bookmark at and coming back to. I did not have time (cough) to listen to the full 2.5 hour recorded Elluminate session, but it’s there waiting. Titled “Knowledge Sharing with Distributed Networking Tools”, the content provided hits the ground on all good points: * Excellent collection of resources on social netowrking tools etc, your smorgasboard of small pieces loosely joined * The way presented is so appropriate- posted on a part of free hosted wikispaces site (I first learned about wikispaces from Leigh’s blog, and have put it to some use over the last year). Stack this up next [...]

Just when we thought the net was full to the brim with social bookmark tools, comes another new kid on the block: RawSugar: RawSugar enables you to save and tag all your favorite web pages and then later find the one need in seconds. Why is this so important? Think of how many times you forgot the name of a restaurant, place or event you’re trying to remember and can’t locate the right web page with the information you need. Saving pages on the web with RawSugar means you can find them in seconds just by remembering a couple of key words. Perhaps your looking for a cafe in San Francisco. Just search for San Francisco cafes and RawSugar displays all the web pages tagged San Francisco and cafes. Looking through the list you’ll find the ones you’ve saved. With RawSugar you can easily save everything worth saving: travel destinations, [...]

Tagging is in. You’re It! From tagging web sites to bookmarks, to photos it is changing the way we look at and organize large globs of information. It is spreading to other content, like news, music, movies, heck, maybe even learning content… Yes, folksonomy is hip and happening, eveolving and causing disruption. However, it thrives in the examples above where there is a large base of users to add to the tag pile, to self-correct, to make it come alive. Tagging down in the tail is another story. Yes, tagging it is not a magic bullet and may not be an instant success. But I believe in what it might offer. I set up an experiment a few weeks ago. A colleague has asked for a recommended list of “online professional development” opportunities for faculty, and rather than just cooking up a list and emailing or posting as a static [...]