Tagging
An interesting mainsteam article about tagging: http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/05/03/social.tagging.ap/index.html
This is so interesting… I particulary like “Tagging is fundamentally about tapping the collective human wisdom, rather than relying on a computer algorithm, for search, said Ben Shneiderman, who teaches human-computer interaction at the University of Maryland.” What what? Librarians have been doing this forever… they're people too. It's really the same as subject headings, but a user defined method for natural language. People are creating their own subject headings! It's a do it yourself world… how can libraries use this? There are definite applications… allow users to search using natural language, tag their resources, and when they find something good - click the subject heading for more exhaustive results. “More like this” BUT, I'm beginning to wonder if anyone beside librarians really care about exhaustive searches… I know, it's hard for us to swallow…

July 26th, 2006 at 11:01 am
[...] Last Christmas I was evangelizing about Flickr to a local library. I stole a photo from her Recent Photos page and uploaded it to my Flickr account to demonstrate tagging, commenting, notes, sets and all that great stuff. Important holiday festivities then beckoned and we drifted away. [...]