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 in the works.

captioned for Stephen Downes who hates screen shots of tweets…

Bumps in the cloud? My Gmail reports Server Error. Coincidently, my water is turned off as well. What’s going on? #paranoidConspiracyTheory

@sridgway Indeed— is not all water supply dependent on clouds? #RideThehydrologicCycle Today is a gangbuster of #MeanlinglessHashTrashTags

Why do I do that? It’s because I am a smart***.

And speaking of trashing hash tags, read how Nicholas Carr looks down his lucid and mind boggling nose at what is being called “hashmobs” — people who instead of assembling in a real place to do something (Flashmobs) just gather around some recent hash tag, jumping in with 140 characters of pseudo action.

The members of a hashmob gather, virtually, around a particular hashtag by labeling each of their tweets with said hashtag and then following the resulting hashtag tweet stream. Hashmobbers don’t have to subject themselves to the weather, and they don’t actually have to be in proximity to any other physical being. A hashmob is a purely avatarian mob, though it is every bit as prone to the rapid cultivation of mass hysteria as a nonavatarian mob.

Ew.

Of course, Carr is a #RealBigTimeAuthorTooBusyToBeBotheredWithBlogComments so we must…. never mind.

But now to the hack part. Hash tags are a pure hack. If twitter had some foresight, they might have created a real tagging structure, where the tags are not messily embedded with the content (besides the point that tagging your content takes away from your space for content). They are not microcontent-able. They are glommed on.

Hash tags though do provide a great service for aggregating, searching, etc. I like and use them. I am not against them. I am not against them. I am not against them. I am not against them.

But at some level, IMHO, they are silly and another, they are a wretched sloppy implementation of a workable tagging environment.

Tag this post #________________________________________ (c’mon commenters, unlike the Rough Type, which seems not rough enough, my blog is always open to distracting comments, so fill in my blanks)

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 old Category listing on the side bar to a tag cloud (I use the option to randomize the order, mmm love randomness), my template code is:

<?php wp_tag_cloud('smallest=10&largest=24&number=40&order=RAND'); ?>

And I tweaked the Archives template in a few places to do a proper header and title. I have my templates tuned to display the links to the tag archives when used, as well as the WP Tags to Technorati plugin which links the same tags to who knows what at Technorati (see the bottom of this post, if I remember to tag it!)

To enable the switch, I used the built -n WordPress tools to convert my old categories to tags (under Manage -> Import), so for now, the cloud is likely heavily weighted my the old categories.

How do they stack up? Putting them side by side, we have, weighing in at about 140 different ones, are my sloppy pile of “Dog Tags” versus the neatly stacked 32 different CatDog-egories:

There is no real answer as to which is “best” (although my headers show my bias) – it’s like asking for a definitive answer to the world’s favorite vegetable (though, I am sure it is not beets. Nope. Nasty. Yeccch). I like tags, but pretty much, in WordPress you can make categories work like tags (multiple associations), so it more boils down to your preferences.

I’m a tagger, what are you?

Read/Write Web: “Bring out your dead!”

Tag Clouds: “I’m not quite dead yet….”

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 to some bloated multimegabyte static PowerPoint full of word slides and see which is more useful and meaningful in the long haul
* The wikified presentation makes good, clean use of Creative Commons licensed flickr images. Makes it look appealing as opposed to a drab text wiki (looks count for something, eh?)
* All content is blatantly CreativeCommons-ed

Sections range from Read/Write Web, to RSS, to Social Software, to Tagging, to Creative Commons, to “Rip Mix Feed” to the Future Virtual Learning Environment.

If you are into new collaboration tools, etc, this one is a keeper!

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, hobby sites, kid’s birthday places, physicians, architects, piano teachers, favorite recipes, professional and business-related resources… you name it!

Actually it looks at quick glance to be as featured as any other one. It has nice way of suggesting tags (some AJAX tag completion is mixed in the sugar?). My mini gripe is the JavaScript bookmarklet tool does not have a way of grabbing the highlighted text in the targeted web page as a default content for its “Notes” field (the site description). This necessitates the window swapping task of cutting and pasting a description from the original site. It takes almost no extra programming weight to provide this feature. I have hacked some other ones by combing through the source page of the add site form, but Raw Sugar had so much JavaScript and other obfuscated code I could not even begin to dabble.

I quickly made an account (I only have 14 of these things), and was able to export my del.icio.us bookmarks as XML and import them into the RawSugar jar… well, it got most of them. It’s a big pile, and there was some obscure proxy error message.

But that does give me good pause to think about what a Good Thing it is that data can be this transportable… I’ve shlepped stuff from furl to del.icio.us from linked my spurl to del.icio.us… shouldn’t more data be as movable? So now I have added RawSugar to my hefty Site Submission Bookmarklet Maker.

So a thumbs up on RawSuga, though I doubt I will do much marking in it now. My only complaint is as being a diabetic of having an aversion to the name– but then again, I doubt one would get far with a site based on “Aspartame” or “Sucralose”.. so I guess the closing phrase is… “sweeeeeeeeeeet”.

Tip of the Blog Hat to “Mr Small Pieces” a.k.a Joho The Blog.

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 web page (“Oh, that is so web 1.0″), I decided to try setting up a special del.icio.us tag of edponline and invite others to add to the list. Collective intelligence should make this a rich soup.

It started okay, Tim Lauer and Seb Fiedler added items. But something went awry as another person started tagging all sorts of stuff (podcasting links, educational tech articles) to the mix, and it got kind of cloudy, muddy, even slightly polluted. I am not casting shame on this person nor looking for an apology, and I think it is highly likely that things were mis-tagged in the haste of adding sites (I am guilty of this more times than I will admit).

In a larger participatory pool this noise would be group corrected or drowned out by more signal. This is how WikiPedia works (thousands of eyes checking content) but my little wiki is encrusted with spam, dead end links, and virtual tumbleweeds blowing by.

Just tagging alone will not make social software work, it is the action and participation of others than work the magic. My little del.icio.us tag experiment is so far down the long tail of activity there, it cannot be distinguished from the horizontal axis. But when you are talking about or trying to get a tagging scheme in motion, you should keep in mind the dynamics of the level of potential participation- just setting it up is not enough.

The tag mud and the sadder examples of tag spam are part of the give and take, the ying-yang of what the net environment offers. You cannot have the richness of good open content without some of the muck in the undercarriage. I am not sure if one really needs a big audience to make tagging successful, but it may take a threshold of active taggers.