Tag Archives: social software

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Video Presentation on Tagging and Folksonomies

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Here’s the video of a presentation I gave at the Cleveland Web Standards Association last month (at the time of this posting the website is a little bare, check out the Meetup page for more details).

In this video I talk about the same topic as myTagging and Folksonomy article in the ASIST Bulletin. What are the different kinds of uses for social tagging and folksonomies and what are users’ motivations for tagging?

Jason Morrison – Tagging Systems & Folksonomies from Cleveland Web Standards on Vimeo.

I’m pretty happy to have been the next presenter after Eric Meyer. In this month’s meeting Brad Colbow talked about CSS positioning.What do you think? Feel free to leave a comment below.

New WordPress plugin available – put tag clouds everywhere with Altocumulus

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If you’ve gone to any of my Category pages on this blog (my Academic papers, for example), you might have noticed I have a tag cloud with just the tags related to that category.  After I figured out how to do it I packaged it into a WordPress Plugin, called Altocumulus.

This goes along with my research interests into folksonomies and information retrieval.  I haven’t had the chance to study tag clouds empirically but my guess is that one giant tag cloud for an entire web site or blog might be more cool looking that useful for navigation.  I think that making use of tag relationships a bit more might show the strength of folksonomies for navigation.  So now, if you click to see my design pages, you can see the kinds of topics my designs cover.

For another example of this in action, take a look at Unsought Input, for example the Innovation page.

Go ahead and download version 0.1 now.   It requires WordPress 2.3 or higher.  This is my first WordPress plugin so I’m sure I’ll figure out ways to make it better over time.  If you have any bugs, pointers, or suggestions please leave them in the comments below.

Tagging and Folksonomy artcle in the ASIST Bulletin

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Walking to the overlook  The issue has been our for a little while now, but I thought I would note that I have an article about The use of tagging systems in this month’s issue of the ASIST Bulletin. Take a look at Why Are They Tagging, and Why Do We Want
Them To?

Almost everyone has a tagging system the web is facing serious weather with tag clouds on every site. I think it’s interesting to explore the uses of folksonomies and why users bother tagging things in the first place. Here’s an excerpt:

When thinking about adding tagging to a site, the first question should be: What do we want to get out of this? Does the site need something to improve search results or a new navigational facet to better connect related pages? Is the goal to classify lots of multimedia objects with minimal cost or to get users to interact with the site a little more?