TaggingFolksonomies

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Tagging/Folksonomies

• Think Tank Session
• November 14, 2007

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What are tags?

• Keywords/descriptors to describe digital objects
• Applied by users of the content
• Keyword or category label. Tags help you find
  photos which have something in common. (Flickrs
  explanation of tags)
• Del.icio.us' explanation of tagging

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What is a folksonomy?

• Collaboratively creating and managing tags
• Freely chosen keywords used instead of controlled
  vocabulary
• Folksonomy is most notably contrasted with a
  taxonomy - done by users, not professionals.

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Tagging vs. folksonomy

• Tags are the descriptors applied to objects
• Folksonomies are the collections of descriptors
  (metadata) created by users and applied to
  objects

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This photo was given the tags house building
colors, along with others
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• The tags for that image are part of a folksonomy

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Advantages of tagging/folksonomies

• Simple to use - no complex structure to learn
• Lower cost of categorization
• Open-ended
• Relevance - user's own terms.
• Support serendipitious form of browsing.
• Easy to tag any object - photo, document,
  bookmark
• Better than no tags at all.
• People want to tag.

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Disadvantages

• Quality of the tags
• Dont work well for finding
• No structure or conceptual relationships
• Issues of scale
• Personal tags or popularity tags
• Most people cant tag very well
• Errors, misspellings, etc.

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Tags vs. subject headings

• LibraryThing's explanation of tags and subject
  headings
• An academic take on LibraryThing tags

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Lets do some tagging
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What tags did you give the photo?

• Cats
• Dogs
• Family
• Papa
• Food
• Gris
• Cats
• Together

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What can we do with tags?

• Del.icio.us
• Flickr
• LibraryThing

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Other sites using tagging

• Last.fm
• Amazon
• Consumating
• YouTube

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Tag Clouds
Find this at Geeksugar
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OCLC's TagCloud Builder
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Firefox add-on
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• Steve - Social Tagging of Art Museum Collections

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Library applications of tagging

• King County Aquabrowser
• Ann Arbor District Library tagging
• LibraryThing for Libraries
• PennTags
• Teen Web - Nashville Public Library
• LibMarks
• del.icio.us libraries
• WorldCat Identities

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More Library applications

• OCLC FictionFinder
• Connotea
• lib.rario.us - social media cataloging

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• Amazon tags for "Deceptively Delicious"

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Resources

• Pew Internet Life Project Report on Tagging
• TagsAhoy
• Tagging Tools
• Structure and form of folksonomy tags The road
  to the public library catalogue
• When tags work and when they don't Amazon and
  LibraryThing

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More resources

• Google Image Labeler
• 43Things
• The Hive Mind Folksonomies and User-Based
  Tagging
• Becoming a tagging kung-fu master
• Tips From Top Taggers
• Picking Up Where Search Leaves Off
• The Peloponnesian War and the Future of
  Reference, Cataloging, and Scholarship in
  Research Libraries

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And just a few more

• Cataloging and You Measuring the Efficacy of a
  Folksonomy for Subject Analysis
• And related blog post - An academic take on
  LibraryThing tags