5 Ways You Can Fall in Love With Tagging Again
Tagging content online is something that doesn't seem to have taken off the way some people expected it to.
Is it too complicated for widespread adoption? Is it too arbitrary to have the impact that formal taxonomies offer? Is it just too much work while you're zipping around the web? Who knows - what's important is that tagging web pages can still be very useful!
I stopped using social bookmarking tools for a big part of 2007 because saving things for my own future reference wasn't enough motivation to invest the time required. In the latter half of the year, though, I've seen what some other people are doing to make it worthwhile again. Here's five and a half ways you can fall in love with tagging URLs again.
1. Re-enforce your learning at the end of year
The inspiration for this post came from social media aficionado Tim Bonnemann's practice of tagging all the words he looks up online with the tag "dictionary." At the end of the year, he posted the full list of links to his blog. What a great way to deepen recall of the things you've learned!
2. Build a collaborative tag stream for a community of practice
One of the best things about tagging URLs is that all kinds of RSS feeds become available. One community of practice, a loose group of nonprofit technologists, uses the tag "nptech" to mark items of interest in del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, flickr, youtube and elsewhere. The feeds for nptech items in all of these services are then combined into one NPtech metafeed.
That makes a good community news feed, but it can be taken even further. At one point as many as 2000 people were using the tag nptech - that can be a lot of information. Consultant Beth Kanter now publishes a summary of each week's highlights from the Nptech feed over at NetSquared.
3. Create a shared items feed and put it on your web page
Many of our readers probably use the shared items feature in Google Reader. That service continues to grow more sophisticated - last week it added any shared items feeds from your Gmail contacts to your list of subscribed feeds, for example.
While that's pretty hot - there's something to be said for baking your own, too. If you tag items something like "toshare" in a service like del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia then you can share URLs that you find outside of Google Reader and you can switch feed readers/tagging services without loosing all your shared items subscribers.
I did this on my personal blog this year by taking the feed from my items tagged "toshare" in del.icio.us and running it through the service FeedDigest. There I got a PHP snippet to display my links and notes on the sidebar of my blog (it's also live here in javascript on the right of this post, albeit a touch wonky with CSS). I also spliced the toshare feed together with my blog's feed (via FeedDigest) and ran the spliced feed through Feedburner. I then added a link to my sidebar offering my shared items + blog posts feed for subscription via Feedburner. Several hundred people have subscribed to get my links and knowing that someone else cares is a huge motivation to keep tagging things I find online. I open my bookmarking app to tag something "toshare" and while I've got it open I may as well give it a few other tags as well for better classification.
This winter I switched from Del.icio.us to Ma.gnolia for my social bookmarking and it was easy to replace the Del.icoi.us feed in FeedDigest with the Ma.gnolia feed. Nothing changed as far as Feedburner was concerned, it was still getting the same spliced feed URL - so all my subscribers are still getting my links.
If you're curious, by the way, the reasons I switched to Ma.gnolia include: OpenID login, a very active development team, engagement with the newest data standards like oAuth and APML, live customer support chat by Pibb IM (also with OpenID, RSS) and a couple of other very cool features. The user community there is quite impressive, too.
4. Tag into a mobile reader
In addition to tagging things "toshare" I've also taken recently to tagging items "toread" and pulling that feed into Netvibes. Netvibes has a great that's good for checking a small number of feeds in between full-reader sessions.
Adding my toread tag to Netvibes has made it easy for me to catch up on things I want to read while traveling around town. Sometimes I'll just read the most widely popular items from my toread feed, by running that feed through AideRSS and getting a new feed of the 20% of those items that were most tagged, Dugg, commented on and linked to. AideRSS can be applied on top of all of the methods on this list.
It's another way that I'm incentivized to open up that tagging interface more than I would be if I was only saving things for posterity. Now a searchable archive of key pages is available as a secondary consequence of tagging things toread and toshare.
5. Tag your microblog posts
If you think opening up del.icio.us to save something is more trouble than it's often worth, then I'm sure you'll agree that it can feel really overwhelming to compose an entire blog post! (I wrote about this once and got linked to by the BBC, whereupon I was promptly called a loser by snarky British readers for even bringing up the dilemma. "Blogging," one said, "is like wearing a coat that says I am Billy No Mates." That's the funniest insult I think I've ever received.)
ANYWAY, I know I'm not alone in finding it much easier to share information over Twitter than by blogging or tagging in a social bookmarking app. Enter Hashtags. Like tagging for Twitter, hashtags are terms you put after a # in a post. Hashtags.org then aggregates all the tweets using a given tag and publishes an RSS feed. Reading a feed of short messages sent from the #sandiegofires was very interesting, for example.
Though you can certainly just subscribe to a search feed through a service like Terraminds - Hashtags let you do all the things in microblogging that you can do using the methods described in numbers 1 through 4 above. See also Dave Sifry's new project Hoosgot - a service he calls the Lazyweb for the age of Twitter.
5 1/2 The future
In a future that leverage our Attention Data, we'll be able to tag things in order to influence our Attention Profiles. What does that mean? It means that once you've exposed your Ma.gnolia APML (Attention Profile Markup Language) to your Bloglines RSS reader - then you'll be able to influence the feeds that Bloglines recommends to you by tagging certain things in Ma.gnolia.
Perhaps you discover that you love reading African photoblogs but you don't know much about the field. Tag a few that you discover in Ma.gnolia and the next time you open up Bloglines it will notice that you've expressed a new interest and recommend some of the top African photoblogs in its giant feed database.
That future isn't terribly far off, in fact. Ma.gnolia already publishes a rudimentary APML file for each user and Bloglines has announced that it will support APML soon.
Conclusion
So tagging hasn't taken off like early fans thought it would - but it's still really useful. If we explore ways that it can provide tangible, short-term, personal value then we can score the long term, aggregate value as a result. I wish it weren't that way - but that's how I've found value in the practice myself.
So let's tag some terms we have to look up the definitions for this year! Please let readers here know about any other super cool tagging practices you've experimented with.
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Social bookmarking could be used for business purposes as well. Employees could tag the company with tag1, a certain project with tag2, and maybe even tag3 which is for a person. del.icio.us has the for: feature but that could be leveraged by any other service, too.
Carsten, I have tried doing that in a number of different places and have found it hard to get people to do it. Right now I am working with someone I'm feeding links to via tag feed, but it's just me doing the tagging and we'll see how long it works for. I'm been thinking about incorporating rss2email so that people can get tagged items that way, but am real curious if you've got any best practice/tips for making that work.
thanks
This whole thing has fascinated me for decades ... literally. My first "database" was in '75, for a community resources library (punched cards sorted using kintting needles. !j/k) got me into "taxonomy" in a big way. (Know kids who read dictionaries for entertainment? Well, I was reading up on Deww Decimal / Library of Congress index systems ... Gödel's theorem or something ... all work pretty well, none perfectly.)
I'm sure there are anthropologists and soc-psych types studying folksonomies ... not just what they contain, but how the arise and evolve.
On one hand things SW ... formalism. On the other hand such as self-assigned blogpost tags ... chaos/anarachy. (Hey, those are notRPTnot put-down terms!)
My stealth project is all about linking that stuff together ... operationalizing glasperlenspiel, if I dare.
Nice compilation MK, thanks; this is a keeper.
#craft #resource #cm (That's for ConceptMapping. *grin*)
--bentrem
Bill, thanks for the link, I've tagged it...well let's keep obscenity off the blog, shall we?
Marshall, no I don't really have any tips because I am working for an institution where the internet and anything associated with it is pretty much left out of the daily work.
Though actually I am quite suprised that this doesn't work within a company. It is actually a productive way to spread information within a company. No need to Google and getting thousands of links with no relevance.
Maybe we (=people who blog, use Twitter, read feeds,...) are way ahead of the ordinary internet users. Would make an interesting post, btw.
6. Use Twine. Let Twine use the Semantic Web to do auto-tagging -- and never have to tag again (but always having the option to do so).
Marshall, we use tagging as a casual/passive way to point out links of interest for friends - it's just less intrusive than an email and you can read a bunch at once when you have time. I wrote up some other suggestions awhile back here if you're interested:
http://www.scrollinondubs.com/2006/07/22/5-ways-to-pimp-your-delicious/
the offline browsing tactic of caching toRead's is actually really useful when you're about to jump on a flight. happy new year to all the RWW homies!
sean
great article!
I'll be diving in to the folksonomic fandango this year ;)
tagmad.com :)
more clues to come...
Happy New Year!
I am a tagging maniac (and probably overdo it), but the del.icio.us firefox extensions + Lijit are what took tagging to the next level for me. I definitely use it as much for work as anything else. The ability to use composite tags (Jon Udell does this better than anyone else) is another
Why doesn't it work more generally? It's definitely tool related. For me hitting ctrl-D and adding some tags is useful work and doesn't take time, but I suppose it is more work for everyone else. Also, how do we re-use what we've tagged later. To me that is the key. Too many people don't quite understand how the tags can be used later and it's not entirely their fault. The tools are still in the geek realm.
Nice overview Marshall!
I am constantly working to pull back Ma.gnolia, OS-level tagging in Mac, and Yojimbo/Together tagging. To some degree I am using Quicksilver for this in a very crude way, but it needs more smoothness and better visualization.
I like the microblogging tagging as I have been wanting to add a small set of tags to my 4,500+ favorites I have starred in Twitter over the last 18 months or more I have used the service. Some of the best info I come across is flowing through Twitter and I stamp it for later, but I am missing an easy means to get back to it. Tags are one easy option, if I can get nice mobile access as the food and travel/city relevant info does me more use from a mobile.
Ah, by "pull back" I mean aggregate on one device or service (prefer device as I am often finding myself needing tagging information most when I am with out web access).
Google Search Bar is more effective than any tagging system out there at the moment.
Tagging is interesting in some domains (like images and video where search is ineffective), but way too ineffective and oversold in everything dominated by text.
Use Twine. Let Twine use the Semantic Web to do auto-tagging -- and never have to tag again (but always having the option to do so).
Posted by: David Scott Lewis | December 31, 2007 3:12 PM
I would use twine. but i cant get into the beta to use it.
I launched Bighow.com, an integrated Citizen Journalism meets Classifieds site, for similar purposes, a structured database which also allowed users to enter and share their own tags, including their own blog posts.
mediavidea.blogspot.com/2007/11/bighow-beeps-in.html
These are still starting times...
Hi, Marshall! Thanks for the mention.
The dictionary list was more of a fun thing that started in 2006 and then continued on the side. You may have noticed that this is the list of a non-native English speaker. I still have to look up way more words than are on the list, and only the more obscure ones (to me, at least) get tagged.
With regard to tagging in general, I seem to get the most value out of it with the dozen or so keywords that I actively follow on del.icio.us, Technorati etc. That's how some of the best content has flown my way this past year, which otherwise I probably wouldn't have been able to discover.
And finally, after now well over two years of using del.icio.us, my link repository there is slowly but surely becoming more useful, too, and I've started to go back to it more often.
Thanks for those cool tips, it's very informative!
Nhick
http://www.itrush.com
@joseph try sharing google bookmarks or sending the URLs to people, or seeing how many others saved them: not very social.
Social bookmarking is great in business, think about how more relevant it is compared with an email like this:
To: random arbitrary grouping
Cc: boss to show that I'm spreading knowledge
Subject: Interesting link
Body: http://non.intiutiveURL.com/content/id.php?=343qeUTYTIT
these tend to get filed under deleted items...
I have written on What is Folksonomy - Why & How to Tag & What, Why, & How to Social Bookmark at http://ambrose.edvibes.com/category/tagging/ it may add to this discussion.
Hi Marshall, great ideas about tagging! I crossblogged it.. (hate the trackback funtion) http://joitskehulsebosch.blogspot.com/2008/01/5-ways-to-continue-tagging.html
I think the title of this post is a little off - it's not about tagging in general, but rather, tagged social bookmarking.
Marshall, I think your example in 5 1/2 (the future) is a little weak, though I don't blame you for keeping it simple. I attempted to expand on this a bit at http://kickstand.typepad.com/metamuse/2008/01/attention-data.html, but it's still fairly high-level and weak.
In short, I believe 2008 will be the year of Attention Data, and user benefits therefrom. Just as the content Web is comprised of HTML links, I think we'll finally see the emergence of the "people Web", comprised of similarities and matches between attention profiles.
Your link to Aiderss.com is wrong. :D
Nice article btw.
After reading number 3 on this post I set-up a shared tag stream that merges with my shared items in Google reader. That was a neat idea. Thanks!
I am also working on a way to make number 2 easier to set up and number 5 more useful. Thank you for calling my *attention* to a few more related ideas.
I am calling my project Semantic Assertions for now.
http://luke.gedeon.name/semantic-assertions-increase-the-value-of-existing-tagging-systems.html
(My apologies if this is a double post. I have disabled CoComment now since it appears to be creating a problem.)
I'm tagging and bookmarking this article because I can see lots of potential for incorporating these ideas in the homeschool, gifted education, and youth group activism communities.
Also, I only understand #1 & #2. Learning how to fully utilize RSS Feeds is still on my to do list. Hmm...maybe I need a "to do" tag.
I do maintain feed only link logger of my favorite links. I uses ma.gnolia with "linklooger" tag for bookmarking. Then I feed ma.gnolia's tag specific feed into feedburner which is customized to use my domain.
http://feeds.thejeshgn.com/linklogger
This gives my readers to subscribe to my fav links. And to mee all the freedom to change anything behind that feed url.