Week 8: Folksonomies

I was eager to read Ellyssa Kroski's article, The Hive Mind because just last week a co-worker was raving about her after meeting her at a conference. He has let me borrow her book "Web 2.0 for Librarians and Information Professionals" which is a great resource for those that are new to web 2.0.

What was great about her article was that she painted a complete picture of the pros and cons of tagging and folksonomies. She was able to give me (a relatively new user of tagging), a clear understanding of what is involved and how it works.

She makes the point that folksonomies are "democratic and self-moderating" and there is a social dynamic involved that guides people into choosing appropriate tags. A good example of this is our own class site blog, where I'm sure we've all glanced at the tag cloud before entering our terms (I know I have).

Although we haven't been using Flickr as a tool for this class, I wanted to share a personal account of how I use Flickr and what this tool has done for me. I have taught English in two different countries on opposite sides of the world, both in small towns which I will probably never see again. I have my own photographs of these places, but have moments of nostalgia to re-visit these places and I use Flickr to get my fix.

Because Flickr is updated frequently and the trail of exploration usually leads to finding pictures that I don't have myself, but remember the locations clearly, this site really does the trick for me. So I can start in Flickr with using the city name as the first keyword to search, and then from there I can spend hours re-discovering the places that I've been to.

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Case Studies:

From the Ann Arbor District Library Catalogue, I checked out the Harry Potter example. Not sure how useful or intuitive some of these tags are, but I'm sure with more people contributing, the more relavant tags will be more frequently used. Some of these tags: 7, final, last, nothing are not very explicit and I'm sure that they will sort themselves out as this tool becomes more popular on the catalogue

On the Blais Catalog - The Libraries of The Claremont Colleges, there is not a lot of consistency with tagging yet. I tried a number of different random searches, and only a couple showed results with Library Thing. There also seemed to be a lag when the tags would show up. I don't know if it was just my connection, but there was definitely a lag between the regular bibliographic information and the tags.

If I wasn't purposely looking for them, I would have not waited for them to load. They would be too easy to miss because they are positioned at the very end of the item record. Maybe a tag cloud could appear higher up on the page? There seems to be a lot of white space in the OPAC that a tag cloud could easily exist in.