Teaching Tagging

Marshall Kirkpatrick Talk at TagCamp lead by Marshall Kirkpatrick

People don’t tag multiples: Using tags like folders is like drawing Venn diagrams with no overlapping circles — possible, but so destructive of the value of the system as to make the effort pointless.Clay Shirky

Analogies
LC subject headings apply as many as are appropriate for later retrieval
Tagging’s an overloaded operator
  • later retrieval
  • collaboration
  • publicizing
  • categorization
  • hard to get people’s head wrapped around the idea
Technical barriers
  • People don’t know about pinging for indexing.
  • Using feedburner to automate pinging
  • You have to understand RSS, search, pings and the rest of the Web 2.0 technologies
  • Hard to get photo sharing users to cognitive shift
  • Need a tagging tool for HTML adverse writers. Blummy a good approach.
  • IE7 restrictions on bookmarklets.
  • Tagging UI’s intimidating Furl’s sucks, but not intimidating
  • LJ shift from memories to tags confused and angered users
Functional tagging
  • Flickr and Technoratti tags for publicizing
  • Tags for retrieval
  • Gutenberg Project around tagging
  • Tagging gap - economic/cultural
  • Portablity of attention data
  • emotional tagging
  • snark tagging
Power dynamics
  • Maintaining privilege — you’re not Glenn Reynolds, Xeni Jardin, or Atrios, how do you get heard.
  • iTunes sharing in workplaces — selective sharing to establish idendity, then the boss looked in, and everyone shut up.
  • the universe of taggers is full of young white men
  • for these conversations

ETA Marshall wrote with a corrected attribution to the ‘venn diagram’ quote. Thanks!

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