In the New Game of Tag, All of Us Are It

Will free-style information tagging lead to anarchy? Early results are showing quite the opposite.
April 18 issue - Melvil Dewey had it easy. In 1876, when he created his famous system of ordering information, the Dewey Decimal Classification System, there weren't Web sites, video clips or blogs. Today's digital world—where millions of items are generated on an hourly basis, and even fantastic search engines can't find all the good stuff—is tougher to organize than a herd of Democrats. But Internet pundits now claim a solution: let the people do the categorizing. Using a practice called tagging, we can collectively label everything from great literature to pictures of your puppy. Bye-bye, Dewey. Hello, do-it-yourself.

As the name implies, tagging something means putting a virtual label on it. (Software lets you do this by simply typing a word; from then on, it's linked to the content.) What the tag says is totally up to you. The important thing is that later you—and others—can find things simply by the tag name. Think of tagging as the opposite of search. By leaving linguistic bread crumbs behind on your wanderings through cyberspace, you can easily relocate the sights (and sites) you saw along the way.

But "keeping found things found"—as Clay Shirky, a teacher at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, explains—is only the first benefit of a grass-roots tagging system. Whereas the old, Dewey-style taxonomies involved graybeards figuring out in advance how things should be categorized, tagging is done on the fly, adapting to the content itself. What's more, because all this is digital, there's no limit to the number of tags people can slap on an item. In a library you can put "Frederick the Great" in the history or the biography section, but you'd need a second copy to put it in both. With digital tags you could use both, and more: military,Prussia, really great reads.

The big question about tagging is whether the lack of rules will lead to anarchy. Early results from the Web sites that exploit tagging show quite the opposite: order seems to emerge from the chaos of freestyle labeling. On a site called del.icio.us, participants put tags on their favorite Web sites, making it not only easy to find information on specific topics, but allowing visitors to view the most popular sites of the whole community. The photo-sharing site Flickr, which classifies images by user-selected labels, has generated a sometimes quirky but totally coherent form of organization, simply because people can check out which tag words get the best responses from the community, and do their own tagging accordingly. "Think of the process as similar to that of language, which is also a self-organized process," says author and tagging proponent David Weinberger. That process is also at work on a Web site called 43 Things, where people express their goals, tag them and comment and commiserate on the goals of others. It turns out that a lot of people on the site read a book called "Getting Things Done." When someone came up with the idea of making a tag called "GTD," others recognized that the abbreviation was an ideal label, and thereafter anyone who posted a goal inspired by that book stuck a GTD tag on it. That's a classic example of how the group effort of tagging can discover its own kind of compelling logic. Tagging enthusiasts call such systems "folksonomies."

Incidentally, 43 Things is funded by Amazon.com. The company won't comment on whether it's considering a customer-generated tagging system to organize its millions of items. But some think it inevitable that not only Amazon but other Net giants—eBay, iTunes and even Google and Yahoo—will let users do the organizing. "Traditionalists may go crazy," says Weinberger, "but the Internet makes them crazy anyway." Let's tag this scheme "promising."

Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Review

Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Review
Social Bookmarking Tools (II) A Case Study - Connotea
基于社会书签的数字图书馆服务-Connotea网络社区分析（Social Bookmarking Tools (II)读后）

Weblogs In Libraries: Opportunities and Challenges

Weblogs are an increasingly popular form of content on the World Wide Web. While they are not a new concept, having been around in one form or another arguably since the very beginning of the Web, they present a number of issues and opportunities for librarians. In examining how weblogs could be used by libraries, there are two fundamental issues. First, what are the important aspects of weblogs that librarians should evaluate and consider. Second, what are the important aspects of traditional library and information science lacking from weblogs that should be considered when using them in a library context.

Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata

This paper examines user-‍generated metadata as implemented and applied in two web services designed to share and organize digital media to better understand grassroots classification. Metadata - data about data - allows systems to collocate related information, and helps users find relevant information. The creation of metadata has generally been approached in two ways: professional creation and author creation. In libraries and other organizations, creating metadata, primarily in the form of catalog records, has traditionally been the domain of dedicated professionals working with complex, detailed rule sets and vocabularies. The primary problem with this approach is scalability and its impracticality for the vast amounts of content being produced and used, especially on the World Wide Web. The apparatus and tools built around professional cataloging systems are generally too complicated for anyone without specialized training and knowledge. A second approach is for metadata to be created by authors. The movement towards creator described documents was heralded by SGML, the WWW, and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. There are problems with this approach as well - often due to inadequate or inaccurate description, or outright deception. This paper examines a third approach: user-‍created metadata, where users of the documents and media create metadata for their own individual use that is also shared throughout a community.

Meanwhile: No Google, please, we're French

PARIS 'When Google challenges Europe." Overnight, the headline in the daily Le Monde turned the popular search engine into a new villain.
The writer was Jean-Noël Jeanneney, head of the French National Library, a historian and highly respected figure in the cultural establishment. What he called for was no less than the first culture war in cyberspace.
He was reacting to the announcement by Google last December of an agreement with five major libraries to digitize 15 million books and make them accessible online. While this seemed like progress for mankind, Jeanneney wrote, it also carried the "risk of a crushing domination by America in the definition of the idea that future generations will have of the world." --Fulltext