tagging

Over the last few weeks I have been concentrating on more formal writing hence the limited number of blog entries. Once this formal writing reaches a point where I feel comfortable with the structure and content I will most probably publish it up here, until then hold tight. In the meantime I have come across a couple of very interesting links related to tagging and folksonomies that are worth remembering.

Folksonomy Generation

David Weinberger has a very interesting post and comment thread named 'What is a folksonomy anyway?' where he tries to come to terms with exactly what a folksonomy is and how it comes about. It is commonly agreed that a folksonomy is a set of user generated tags assigned to related pieces of content, but the real question is what role does the process of tag creation have to play in the establishment of a true folksonomy?

I was reading David Weinberger's blog today and saw two interesting things, the first was a dilemma he was facing with tag namespaces and the second was his idea of an 'ideal tag results page'. The first discussion centered around which website should be referenced when blog tagging (i.e using the rel="tag" microformat). A general theme in the subsequent comments was that his tags should first link back to his own blog site to show his tagged blogs and then from there provide links to other tag services (like Technorati, del.icio.us or Flickr).

A Mash-up in the Web sense is when you grab a bunch of disparate API’s, say Google Maps and live crime statistics and come out with something whose sum is greater than that of its parts (in this example chicagocrime.org). A Wrap-up is my term for the grouping of hyperlinks and tags with a supporting wiki-based summary of the ideas, issues and decisions reached within the identified dataset. In both cases the outcome is of more inherit value than its component pieces. Yet without the individual value of the compontents the end result lacks credibility or interactivity, making the concept as a whole less appealing or conclusive.

As I said in my last post a major issue we were facing in the Reasonate testing was quickly gaining an global overview of a project or individual’s progress without having to read and understand numerous scrapbook-like blog postings. Just to complicate matters these posts are often related to, but not explicit in their overall meaning or relationship to the design’s end goals. Or how I put it more pragmatically last time round:

For the last few months I have been very busy developing and testing Reasonate within the BBSc303 ‘Digital Craft’ class at the VUW School of Architecture. The main purpose of the testing was to evaluate the adoption rate and usage trends of blogging and tagging within a simulated team design process. In concert with this goal the testing was also used to establish what sort of toolset design-orientated bloggers require, especially when operating within a structured environment of project groups, tutors (fellow students) and course coordinators (the lecturer, Mike Donn and myself).

At the end of the BBSc303 tutorial on Tuesday I held a feedback session with the students present regarding Reasonate, their experiences with it and areas that could be addressed. This feedback session was prompted following the observation that the tagging functionality was not being utilised by students as much as hoped.

My opinion of this was that the current usage pattern suggested a scrap-booking mentality by most students and tagging (if it occurred) would probably follow once the bulk of the modelling work was completed and the emphasis shifted to explaining the overall process cohesively.
The students present provided the following feedback: