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Archive for September 17th, 2007:
The anti-social folksonomist
I’m finding that in del.icio.us I’m using keywords that no one else uses. Does this mean I’m an anti-social folksonomist?
This discovery reminds me that it’s important for findability to have tags that others will use too. On sites where popularity counts, it might be better to match others’ tags depending on what your end goal is - is your goal to categorize for your own easy retrieval later, or to tag so that others can see what you’ve tagged as being similar to their own findings?
For example, I use a tag called “blogthis” for items that have caught and held my interest but I don’t have time to immediately write a blog post about the item. Apparently no one else uses this tag! Or if they are using a “blogthis” tag, it’s those items aren’t shared.
Tagging is so easy, especially the way it’s implemented on sites like flickr and del.icio.us. But what conscious decisions are you making when you select a tag? This article has a good cognitive analysis of the act of tagging. To me, the lovely and freeing part about folksonomies for taxonomy is the decoupling of concerns about “matching” others tags and the ability to have multiple categories with similar meanings.
What does easy tagging mean for indexing professionals? Is it the crowdsourcing of indexing? Or is the printed book still a strong enough meme that a professional index is a requirement for certain media? Or is it a third, hybrid being, with identity and authority tied up in the tag selection?
Hyperviews Online article about CMS for website
Here’s a link to my latest article on Hyperviews Online, the newsletter/blog for the Society for Technical Communication Online Special Interest Group (STC Online SIG). It’s called Using a Content Management System (CMS) for your STC community web site.
The STC Austin chapter is re-designing the community website, and I volunteered to help. We started researching CMS use and I found that quite a few sites were using WordPress, so I emailed the webmasters to learn more. The article is a result of that email survey where I learned more about WordPress as a CMS.
