Hillside Meditations

OK, most of the visitors of my blog being long-time first-class bloggers this entry is a practice in carrying owls to Athens, but via MicroPersuasion I found this informative article on tags and tagging on www.businessweek.com , telling everything you need to know about tags from how a certain Joshua Schachter thought about using the technology and building del.icio.us on it to thoughts about how traditional www-search engines compare to folksonomy and what the future might bring.

Of course, when you come to think of it, tagging is quite an old technique we all of us have used before (when we marked our index cards with colored riders or tags or used any other way of sorting our possessions - put all books with poetry in them in one part of the bookcase and the cartoons in another) - but using individual tagging in a collective way gives new life and power to the procedure. (I have to admit that recently I have discovered tagging anew in my private environment, as well, and have taken to sorting quite a few things - and no, we won´t share these tags).

TagCloud is a service that lets you easily build tag collections from your favorite RSS feeds: “TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feeds you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds.” I am not sure that this is really too useful, but a nice idea anyway - and I would make use of it if I had not already the WeightedWords plugin for WordPress installed in my blog (see my sidebar for my personal tagcloud) which is doing this very thing for my own blog. (The TechnoTag plugin is helping me tag my entries for Technorati).

See also what TechCrunch and Sudar Blogs write about “TagCloud”.

Here is what Technorati writes about its tags and Guardian Unlimited carries another interesting article on Flickr tags.

I do not know why the Wikipedia article on Folksonomy is being scheduled for deletion, but I just took this definition from it: “Folksonomy” literally means “people’s classification management”,”a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords.” Inventing your own tags and using and sharing them makes a folksonomous classification system.

Quite certainly a craze at the moment, fostered by the likes of Technorati and Flickr and del.icio.us, but one of the more handsome, plausible, useable and useful things I have seen on the Web in latter times.

tags, tagcloud, tag, weightedwords, plugin, folksonomy, tagging, classification, tagcloud.com, tagsets,

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 10th, 2005 at 10:33 pm and is filed under regular, on blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.