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October 24, 2005
Tagging on Flickr & del.icio.us
Jessamyn West's half of the session was a fabulous rundown on Flickr. When Jessamyn asked how many people knew about Flickr, about a third of the room raised their hands. Pretty keen.
A lot of Jessamyn's talk was much like my talk for Webjunction, with more detail. Things she covered that I didn't include:
- "Global" vs. "local" tags: When you look at a list of tags for an image, it's got two parts: a little globe image on the left, and the tag as text on the right. Click on the globe, and you see the images on Flickr with that tag that belong to *everyone* on Flickr. Click on the text link, and you only see *your* photos with that tag. Nice interface widget.
- Tag cloud: Click on the "Tags" link on a photostream page, and you'll get the tag cloud, which contains all of the tags in an account. The bigger the font size of the tag, the more images are associated with the tag. So very visual and easy to understand.
- Hot tags: Click on the "Tags" link at the top of any page, and you'll see a list of tags that have been crazy popular in the past 24 hours. It's an easy, visual way to tell what's been going on the world, and how people have visually recorded it.
So what makes Flickr so social, and therefore so different? Flickr follows a "desire lines" philosophy, letting people create their own metadata, laying paths where people are walking instead of trying to lay out paths and assuming people will follow them (like, say, structured classification). This gives you an opportunity to observe a user-based classification, and learn what your users think your data is about, and possibly using that to your advantage to, say, improve your classification, or study how the patron mind works.
Jessamyn was very careful to note that she is *not* promoting the abandonement of cataloging and classification in favor of the relative anarchy of tagging. It's more of a supplemental tool, to enhance what you already have. So while folksonomy sounds scary and evil, it's really not all that bad. Consider that, like Wikipedia and other successful community-based systems, it tends to be organized and self-moderating (so much so that Flickr photo pages include a "may offend" link that allows you to tag a potentially offensive photo) and something that librarians should think about.
Jenny's portion of the session focused on del.icio.us, a social bookmarking service that allows you to save bookmarks to an account on a web site, so that they are accessible from anywhere with a browser and Internet access, but also lets you share your bookmarks through tagging, just like Flickr.
It's in her presentation that the "let me be your filter" theme came up again, where del.icio.us is a way to find information that you are interested in. Searching by tag will show you results from other del.icio.us user accounts; if you find a user that seems to be an expert or enthusiast on a topic with good bookmarks, then that user can become your filter on that subject. Like Flickr, you can also check out the del.icio.us tag cloud, which shows you what's popular right now by way of varying font sizes.
And, your options for finding and tracking bookmarks are manyfold:
- Track a specific person's bookmarks, or a topic, or a tag.
- Browsing, [kinda like the bookstore browse vs. trying to find something on a library shelf using the call number system, serendipity vs. structure]
Check out how some libraries are using del.icio.us:
- La Grange Park Library: They use del.icio.us to bookmark interesting links for the reference desk, which both patrons and librarians can see, and is searchable.
- Thomas Ford Memorial Library: As tags are added to the library's del.icio.us account, they are automatically pulled into a page on the library's web site using a script. Patrons and visitors have the option of subscribing to an RSS feed of the links added to the account.
del.icio.us is not alone in this social bookmarking game. Here are the sites Jenny mentioned that I think would most interest librarians:
- CiteULike: an acadmic flavor of social bookmarking.
- Yahoo My Web 2.0 (beta)
- Amazon Concordance: Click on "Search inside the book" for a book listing, then click on "Concordance", and you get a tag cloud for the book.
- Books We Like: Started out with books, but also lists other media now.
- LibraryThing: Catalog your books, cross-tag with Flickr and del.icio.us.
One site that she didn't mention that I like a whole lot is All Consuming, which lets you list, tag, and share items you are consuming (books, CDs, movies, etc.).
Jenny recommended two nifty articles on social bookmarking tools in the April 2005 issue of D-Lib Magazine. You should also check out the "Social Machines" feature in the August 2005 issue of Technology Review.
So, social bookmarking and tagging:
- Are nifty, patron-centric ways of getting at what patrons really mean.
- Create an easy-share, already built infrastructure on which to create a collaborative information-sharing environment.
- Create an excellent way for patrons (and librarians) to add *supplemental* metadata to content and collections.
October 24, 2005 5:28 PM