I’m ensconced in the Phoenix Airport (again, love the free wifi, thanks y’all!) waiting for the Southwest cattle call for the flight to San Antonio, where later this week is the NMC Regional Conference. The theme is “New Challenges … New Ideas” with tracks on The Future of Scholarship, Bringing Virtual 3-D Worlds to Reality, and Embracing the New Web.
Speaking of the latter, we are setting out again a request for flickr photos, blogposts, and del.icio.us bookmarks related to this conference be tagged with the “official” tag (I made it official) of nmc2006reg. We did this tagging last summer for the conference in Cleveland with fair results. Follow the tag this conference page for highlights from this week’s fete. There’s not much now- I had no photos of San Antonio, so hodgepodged some other photos from Texas or one of a cowboy hat.
I’d be curious sometime to look more at the amount of tagging that really goes on. I am convinced it is from a relatively small number of individuals (but bless them for being tag-nostic). For example, I looked at our flickr tags from the NMC summer conference, where I see 345 photos tagged by 13 individuals… maybe 3.8% of the total participating at the conference (abut 300). At the annual EDUCAUSE conference in Dallas this year, there were 721 flickr photos tagged educause2006, from 19 individuals, maybe 0.29% of the total at the conference (6667 attendees).
I’m not comparing the tagging rate per conference, but realizing that… very few people tag. You have to be rather anal or committed or a folksonomy addict or … I am not convinced that tagging is anywhere close to a tipping point.
So consider this a dare, a request, a plea… for those coming to San Antonio, to become tag-anautics.
Tag! You’re not it? Why?
I think you’re right … now it makes me wonder whether or not tagging is just early adoption crap … or we’re just tweedy birds in the mine or whatever …
Right now, I’m looking at widgets and connecting it to the early adoption of tagging …
nmc2006reg. Yeah, there’s a system that’s intuitive and easy to use.
More and more this tagging thing is going to become unworkable, like those password systems that demand three numbers a special character and rotate every month (resulting in password-laden sticky notes pasted to the monitors of computers everywhere).
Gee, I am so regretful I did not consult with you– if you can think of a better tag that is not 3 miles long for NMC 2006 Regional Conference (and nmc2006 was used), fire away.
I don’t get the part about requiring sticky notes- for people tagging content, it is for about 2 days they might need to remember it (and it is in the printed program). flickr and del.icio.us have tagging recall tools (del.icio.us auto completes, so just a start of”nmc” gets me there). And I don’t think of them as something people can just guess at later to locate the tagged content– I see them as URLs we can attach that do the collection.
But hey, if you think that is the reason why relatively few people tag… I’ll consider it.
So did you get my shipment of MatrixCo’s Blue Pills? There should also be a smiley face “Have a Nice Day” t-shirt in the box as well 😉
Hmm .. what if you gave out laptop stickers with the tag on it? Too late now .. or moo cards. There should also be a verbal reminder at session.
Practical ideas… the tagging is almost an after thought (even for me). There will be verbal reminders…. shameless begging…. threats of physical harm (just kidding).
ideally, tagging would be automatic. GPS from the camera would tell you where. The time would tell you when, obviously. Combine the two. Show me all photos taken within 500m of these coordinates, between these two dates… Add geotagging to blog posts, and it should work there, too. I’m writing a patent application tonight on this…