Week 5: Tagging & Social Bookmarking

December 3, 2007

If you’ve ever used a subject heading in a library catalogue, written names or places on the back of a photograph, or organized the contents of your desktop (real or virtual!) into folders, you’re already familiar with tagging! Before we jump into more details about tagging and social bookmarking, why not start with this little video (thank you, once again, Common Craft!)

A tag is just a keyword or term, and tagging is the process of assigning or associating them to something. We usually talk about tagging with online content like websites, digital photos, or blog posts, but the concept is the same as your handwritten notes on the family snapshots.

Tags are completely unstructured and freeform. You choose terms that are meaningful for you, so if “cooking” makes more sense to you than “cookery”, you’re free to use it! Tagging also lets you combine terms any way you want, so your favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe might be tagged:

  • cooking chocolate or
  • baking chocolate_chips or
  • chocolatechip cookies or
  • yummy_recipes

You get to decide. Just bear in mind that tags are often separated by spaces, so chocolate_chip_cookies and ChocolateChipCookies are both one tag, while chocolate chip cookies is three tags. Makes for creative spelling, spacing, and capitalization.

This week, we’re exploring a couple of popular websites that use tagging: del.icio.us and Flickr. del.icio.us is a site that lets you save and organize links to web content. It’s sort of like the “Bookmarks” or “Favorites” folders in Firefox or Internet Explorer. Only better. With del.icio.us, you never have to remember which computer you saved that link on. So if you’re going from work to home, or to different computers around the library, all of your bookmarks are always available.

Flickr is specifically for digital photographs and images. Like del.icio.us, once you’ve saved an image in Flickr it’s accessible from where ever you happen to be. It’s easy to share your photos, too.

For this week’s activities, try out some tagging and social bookmarking:

Activity #1
Search del.icio.us for something you’re interested in. Check out some of the tags people have used for that topic. Try the same search in Google or another Internet search engine. In your blog, tell us what you thought! How do the results compare? Were there any that you didn’t expect? Did you find any tags that were confusing or especially useful?

Activity #2
Set up an account on del.icio.us. Add a few websites and add your own tags to each of your links. If you like del.icio.us and want to easily add bookmarks to your account, you can put buttons on your browser toolbar. Instructions are available for Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Activity #3
Visit Flickr and browse the “Popular” tags (the link is at the bottom of the page) or try a search. Explore some of the related tags. Put a link in your blog to your favorite photo.

Further Readings (optional!)

Posted by amanda etches-johnson
Filed in tagging, week 5
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